Biography

Mingxuan grew up in Zhengzhou and went to the school of life science and biotechnology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University for a 6 year B.S.-M.S. program (2004-2010). His master thesis was advised by Dr. Huchen Zhou and Dr. Linquan Bai.

Next Mingxuan moved to the garden state in the U.S. and graduated from Princeton University with chemistry Ph.D. in 2015. He was advised by Dr. Dorothea Fiedler to study the cell signaling of diphosphoinositol polyphosphate using chemical tools.

Mingxuan then went to Maryland, where he joined the Phil Cole lab for postdoc training at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2015, and later moved to Harvard Medical School Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2017. In the Cole lab, he used chemical tools to study the molecular mechanisms of the CoREST complex-chromatin interactions.

Mingxuan joined the school of science at Westlake University in fall 2019 as an assistant professor. His research interests include developments of novel chemical tools to understand how chromatin remodeling complexes regulate gene transcription via histone modifications.

Selected Publications

1. Q. Yang, Y. Gao, X. Liu, Y. Xiao, M. Wu*. “A General Method to Edit Histone H3 Modifications on Chromatin Via Sortase-Mediated Metathesis” Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2022, 61, e202209945

2. Z. A. Wang^#, S. D. Whedon^#, M. Wu^#, S. Wang, E. A. Brown, A. Anmangandla, L. Regan, K. Lee, J. Du, J. Y. Hong, L. Fairall, T. Kay, H. Lin, Y. Zhao, J. W. R. Schwabe*, and P. A. Cole*. “Histone H2B Deacylation Selectivity: Exploring Chromatin’s Dark Matter with an Engineered Sortase” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2022, 144, 3360

3. M. Wu, D. Hayward, J. H. Kalin, Y. Song, J. W.R. Schwabe and P. A. Cole. “Lysine-14 acetylation of histone H3 in chromatin confers resistance to the deacetylase and demethylase activities of an epigenetic silencing complex” eLife, 2018, 7:e37231.

4. M. Wu, L. S. Chong, D. H. Perlman, A. C. Resnick, D. Fiedler. “The inositol polyphosphates intersect with protein signaling and metabolic networks via two distinct mechanisms.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2016, 113, E6757.

5. M. Wu, L. S. Chong, S. Capolicchio, H. J. Jessen, A. Resnick, D. Fiedler. “Probing diphosphoinositol polyphosphate function with non-hydrolyzable analogs.” Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2014, 53, 7192-7197.

6. M. Wu, B. E. Dul, A. J. Trevisan, D. Fiedler. “Synthesis and characterization of non-hydrolysable diphosphoinositol polyphosphate messengers.” Chem. Sci. 2013, 4, 405-410.

7. M. Wu, Q. Meng, M. Ge, L. Bai, H. Zhou. “2,3,6-Trideoxy sugar nucleotides: synthesis and stability.” Tetrahedron Lett. 2011, 52, 5799-5801.