Welcome to Dou Lab at Westlake

We are a research group in the School of Life Sciences at Westlake University. Our lab focuses on developing bioinformatics methods to detect repeat and non-repeat region genomic mosaic mutations from multi-omics sequencing data, tracing lineages under both normal and disease states in humans and investigating the role of mosaic mutations in aging and related human diseases.

Genomic mosaicism is an emerging field that has gained increasing attention, primarily due to the high occurrence rate of mosaic mutations and their impacts on various cancers and non-cancer diseases. Despite growing interest, many fundamental scientific questions remain unresolved. For example, are mosaic mutations a cause or a consequence of aging? Every human is born with numerous mosaic mutations accumulated from the very first postzygotic cell division—could these early mutations be used to predict the incidence of late-onset diseases? Are repeat-region variants important for disease onset? Why do somatic and germline tissues exhibit different mutation rates? Moreover, bioinformatics methods for detecting diverse types of mosaic mutations are still 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 mosaic mutations and diseases developed later in life. We would also make use of neutral mosaic mutations to study developmental processes in healthy/disease individuals. In brief, our lab in Westlake University would focus on (but not restricted to) the following directions:

1. Developing bioinformatics algorithms to detect both repeat-region and non repeat-retion mosaic mutations from multi-omics sequencing data;

2. Conducting in-vivo lineage tracing in normal and disease states in humans;

3. Exploring the impact of mosaic mutations on aging and a series of 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.