Recognizing Plant Cell authors: Zhong-Qi Chen
Zhong-Qi Chen, first author of DNA Geminivirus Infection Induces an Imprinted E3 Ligase Gene to Epigenetically Activate Viral Gene Transcription
Current Position: Postdoctoral researcher, Vecter-borne Virus Research Center, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fujian, China
Education: PhD, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Non-scientific Interests: swimming, soccer
Brief bio: My journey of scientific learning started in the year 2010 in Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing where I completed my Ph.D. degree. I was fascinated by the complexity of plant/virus interactions. Therefore, I joined the lab of Prof. Hui Shan Guo for my Ph.D. studies, that were focused on functions of Geminiviral proteins in Arabidopsis. This project also helped me obtain expertise in protein ubiquitination from the lab of Prof. Qi Xie. In this project, we found Geminiviruses induce a host E3 ligase in mediating proteosomal degradation of plant cytosine methyltransferases to facilitate infection establishment. After completing my Ph.D., I moved to the city of Fuzhou (Fujian, China) to pursue postdoctoral research. Here, I continued my exploration on plant-virus interaction with a model RNA virus, Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) to discover novel host components involved in antiviral RNAi.
