Chongyuan Luo, PhD

Dr. Chongyuan Luo's research program aims to develop approaches to study the genetic and epigenetic basis of human diseases, including cancer. He is at the forefront of developing cutting?edge single-cell epigenomic technologies and uses these methods to study the gene regulatory diversity in healthy and diseased human tissues. He developed high?throughput single-cell methylome profiling methods snmC-seq and snmC-seq2 that have enabled cell-type classification and identification of cell-type-specific regulatory elements across neuronal subtypes in human and mouse brains.

More recently, he has developed single-cell multi-omic methods that allow the multi-modal integration of transcriptome, DNA methylome, chromatin accessibility and chromatin conformation, providing a near-comprehensive epigenomic characterization of individual cells. His work has also assessed the regulatory landscape of in vitro models for neural differentiation, including cerebral organoids.

Lee DS, Luo C, Zhou J, Chandran S, Rivkin A, Bartlett A, Nery JR, Fitzpatrick C, O'Connor C, Dixon JR, Ecker JR. Simultaneous profiling of 3D genome structure and DNA methylation in single human cells. Nat Methods. 2019 Oct;16(10):999-1006. doi: 10.1038/s41592-019-0547-z. Epub 2019 Sep 9.

Luo C, Liu H, Wang B, Rivkin A, Bartlett A, Nery JR, Ecker JR. Multi-omic profiling of transcriptome and DNA methylome in single nuclei with molecular partitioning. 2018 in press.

Luo C, Rivkin A, Zhou J, Sandoval JP, Kurihara L, Lucero J, Castanon R, Nery JR, Pinto-Duarte A, Bui B, Fitzpatrick C, O'Connor C, Ruga S, Van Eden ME, Davis DA, Mash DC, Behrens MM, Ecker JR. Robust single-cell DNA methylome profiling with snmC-seq2. Nat Commun. 2018 Sep 20;9(1):3824. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-06355-2.

Luo C, Keown CL, Kurihara L, Zhou J, He Y, Li J, Castanon R, Lucero J, Nery JR, Sandoval JP, Bui B, Sejnowski TJ, Harkins TT, Mukamel EA, Behrens MM, Ecker JR. Single-cell methylomes identify neuronal subtypes and regulatory elements in mammalian cortex. Science. 2017 Aug 11;357(6351):600-604. doi: 10.1126/science.aan3351.

Luo C, Lancaster MA, Castanon R, Nery JR, Knoblich JA, Ecker JR. Cerebral Organoids Recapitulate Epigenomic Signatures of the Human Fetal Brain. Cell Rep. 2016 Dec 20;17(12):3369-3384. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2016.12.001.