Chuan He
Chuan He () is a Chinese-American chemical biologist, and is currently the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is best known for his work in discovering and deciphering reversible RNA methylation in post-transcriptional gene expression regulation. Education. He graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1994 with a B.S. in Chemistry. After his Ph.D. training with Stephen J. Lippard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he worked under Gregory L. Verdine as a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow at  Harvard University. He became a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago in 2002. Research. In 2010, He proposed that RNA modifications could be reversible and may have regulatory roles analogous to well-known reversible DNA and protein modifications. He and colleagues subsequently discovered the first RNA demethylase that oxidatively reverses N6-methyladenosine (mA) methylation in mammalian messenger RNA (mRNA) in 2011. The existence of mA in mRNA was discovered in 1974 in both eukaryotic and viral mRNAs; however, the biological significance and functional role were not known before He’s work. This methylation is  the most abundant internal modification in mammalian mRNA. In 2012, two independent studies reported transcriptome-wide mapping of mA in mammalian cells and tissues, revealing a unique distribution pattern. He and co-workers identified and characterized the direct reader proteins for mA, which impact the stability and the translation efficiency of mA-modified mRNA, elucidating functional roles of mRNA methylation. His group also purified the methyltransferase complex that mediates this methylation. The He laboratory also studies DNA methylation. He invented TAB-seq, a method that can map 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) at base-resolution genome-wide, as well as hmC-Seal , a method that covalently labels 5hmC for its detection and profiling. Together with two other research groups, He and co-workers have revealed the DNA "N"-methyldeoxyadenosine as a new methylation mark that could affect gene expression in eukaryotes.