Professor Ling-Ling Chen is the winner of the 2024 FAOBMB Award for Research Excellence
Professor Ling-Ling Chen
Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
Ling-Ling Chen is an expert on RNA biology with a focus on long noncoding RNAs and circular RNAs. Her team works on how they are made, what roles they play in cells, and how their dysregulation links to rare and autoimmune diseases. Most recently, her team developed circular RNA-based modalities beneficial to animal models with auto-inflammation diseases
Ling-Ling Chen obtained a Bachelor degree in Biology from Lanzhou University, China in 2000, followed by a Master degree in Pharmacology from Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2003. She then went to USA and carried out doctoral and post-doctoral work in Biomedical Science at UConn Health (Farmington, Connecticut) with Gordon G. Carmichael from 2004 to 2010. From then on, she embarked on her academic journey in the RNA field. She also completed an MBA degree in Management at UConn Business School in 2009 and was promoted to Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut in 2010. Ling-Ling moved to the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science (also known as the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, SIBCB), CAS, as an independent Principal Investigator in 2011. She was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) International Research Scholar in 2017, and as a New Cornerstone Investigator in 2022. She has been appointed as the Associate Director, State Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology from 2017 to 2022, and as the Founding Director of the Key Laboratory of RNA Innovation, Science and Engineering (RISE), CAS, since 2022.
Ling-Ling studies RNA biology with a focus on long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) and circular RNAs. By pioneering characterization of non-polyadenylated RNAs, she discovered small nucleolar RNA (snoRNA)-related lncRNAs and the widespread expression of circular RNAs from pre-mRNAs. These new RNA species play important roles in gene regulation, thereby expanding the complexity of mammalian transcriptomes and our knowledge of lncRNA features. She uncovered some key features of circular RNA biogenesis, folding and degradation, which have impacts on innate immunity and autoimmune diseases. She demonstrated that synthesized RNA circles exhibit minimal immunogenicity, which broadens potential applications of circular RNA-based modalities, including the successful development of circular RNA aptamers beneficial to animal models of human diseases. [In this context, aptamers are short sequences of RNA that bind to specific target molecules, or families of target molecules].
Moreover, she proposed to link lncRNA processing to functional studies and developed RNA-based high-resolution imaging and living cell approaches, contributing to the discovery of functional divergence of lncRNAs via non-conserved RNA processing, and novel modes of lncRNA action in modulating the function and assembly of RNA-related nuclear bodies, including the nucleolus and paraspeckles.
In addition to her research contributions, Ling-Ling is a generous contributor to the scientific community, serving as an Associated Editor of RNA and on Editorial Boards of several prestigious journals, including Cell, Science, Molecular Cell, Cell Chemical Biology, and Trends in Biochemical Sciences. She has also served as an organizer of various Cold Spring Harbor Meetings, Keystone Symposia, the FASEB Conference and of the 2020 and 2023 RNA Society Annual Meetings. She is a Board Member of the Chinese Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, as well as the Chinese Society of Biophysics.
Ling-Ling has been recognized by multiple awards, including the CBIS (Chinese Biological Investigators Society) Young Investigator Award (2016), the L’Oréal China for Women in Science Award (2016), the HHMI International Research Scholar (2017), the C.C. Tan Life Science Award (2017), the Explorer Prize (2020), and the RNA Society Mid-Career Research Award (2021).