Welcome to Dou Lab at Westlake

We are a research group in the School of Life Sciences at Westlake University. Our lab is primarily a computational biology/bioinformatic group that develops and uses a wide range of genomic, bioinformatic, and statistical methods to do data-mining and explore biological questions. Our aim is to explore and understand mosaic mutations in human genomes. Mosaicism happens because a mutation arises at some point after the zygote is created. Mosaic mutations arising early during development generally are present in relatively high proportion of cells, affecting high proportion of tissues and are likely to be transmitted to the next generation. Mosaic mutations are common in normal human genomes and have been reported to be implicated in a variety of disorders.
　Genomic mosaicism is an emerging field which has gained more and more attention, mainly due to the high mosaic mutation occurrence rate and the impacts of mosaic mutations in varied cancer and non-cancer diseases. There remain a lot of unresolved scientific questions. For example, every human is born with numerous mosaic mutations accumulated from the very first postzygotic cell division, is it possible to use these early mutations to predict the incidence of late-onset diseases? The onset of cancer usually happens after aging, but could some early-embryonic mosaic mutations contribute to the origin of cancers? In addition, bioinformatics methods to detect varied kinds of mosaic mutations are far from mature.

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　We will devote our effects to draw a comprehensive view of mosaic variants in human genomes by developing new methods identifying different kinds of mosaic variants. We will then expand our focus to decipher the mutation mechanisms, mutation consequences and elucidate the relationship between early developmental mosaic mutations and diseases developed later in life. We would also make use of neutral mosaic mutations to study embryonic developmental processes in disease individuals. In brief, our lab in Westlake University would focus on (but not restricted to) the following directions:

1. Develop new methods to detect different kinds of mosaic variants;
2. Explore the mutation profiles at different stages of human development;
3. Pan-cancer analysis of early-embryonic mosaic mutations;
4. Explore the potential role of mosaic mutations in aging process and non-cancer human diseases.

We are looking for passionate new PhD students, Postdocs, and Research Assistants to join the team (more info) !

Funding:

We are grateful for funding from Westlake University and NSFC.