Meng Luo, PhD

Expertise: Dr. Luo has years of experience on gene expression and regulation in the constitutive and induced resistance of corn and peanut against the pathogen Aspergillusflavus infection and aflatoxin production, especially on the cross-talking genes under biotic and abiotic stresses. He proved the stored RNAs' production in a specific phase during the hosts' development, and analyzed their function. Based on the stored RNAs, he developed a biomarker set to evaluate host’s genotype with eliminating aflatoxin production.  

Specialty: Dr. Luo introduced the single molecule tagging technology (UMI) to amplicon library’s construction in microbiome analysis. Based on UMI, each taxa’s absolute quantification in microbiota can be measured in the next generation sequencing (NGS) based on 16S rRNA gene or in the third generation sequencing (TGS) based on rrn operon. This technology changes the inaccurate description of relative abundance used in the traditional microbiome analysis, and makes the microbiome analysis possible to be as a clinical test in precision medicine. The UMI based absolute quantification has been also used in the miRNA analysis in his lab, and received a NIH R01 research fund based on this technology.

Collaboration interest: the bacterial signature’s identification in microbiota associated with human specific diseases, and their usage as biomarkers in the disease and health status' assessment; the prebiotics or herbal medicines in regulating specific bacterial growth to improve gut bacterial dysbiosis and chronic inflammation.

Professional service: Dr. Luo is in charge of the sequencing facility of Microbial Genomics Research Group (MGRG) to provide NGS service using Illumina platform. The services include shotgun whole genome DNA sequencing; amplicon’s sequencing of specific target genes such as 16S rRNA for bacteria, ITS for fungi, etc.; CHIP sequencing for DNA and protein interaction; RNA-Seq and small RNA sequencing mainly for human and trial animals. By the end of June 2023, MGRG has finished more than 180 projects and more than 17,000 samples. Recently, the long-read TGS platform of Nanopore (ONT) is available in MGRG to support faculty’s research. The current supporting studies using TGS include the pathogen's rapid identification of nontuberculous mycobacteria and bacterial signature identification at species or strain level.