Self-introduction

Dr. Rao is currently full Professor at the School of Life Sciences, SUSTech. He obtained his B.Sc. from National University of Singapore, where he worked with Prof. Yunhan Hong on telomerase in medakafish. He then pursued his Ph.D. at Nanyang Technological University, where he worked with Prof. Zhao-Xun Liang on enzymes metabolizing cyclic dinucleotide messengers. His postdoctoral training was conducted at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he worked with Lasker Laureate Prof. Solomon H. Snyder on the physiological roles and signaling mechanisms of inositol polyphosphate metabolites. After a brief assistant investigator appointment at the National Institute of Biological Sciences, he joined SUSTech in 2016.

At SUSTech, Dr. Rao’s research group studies the signaling principles of emerging messenger molecules and their metabolic enzymes, with an emphasis on how they are integrated into cellular (patho)physiology via signal transduction pathways under disease micro-environment. His research team have delineated how Inositol hexakisphosphate (IP6) kinases (IP6K), via converting the signaling metabolite IP6 to IP7, play important roles in cell fate determination, cancer metastasis and DNA damage repair; In recent years, they’ve elucidated the upstream signaling pathway leading to IP6K activation, which implicates IP7 as a GPCR messenger transmiting neural regulation of metabolism. The lab has also discovered IP6 as an intermolecular “glue” bridging the Cullin Ring E3 Ligases and its inhibitor: the deneddylase COP9 Signalosome, thereby regulating glucose-dependent proteastasis. Such regulation safeguards physiological glucose response, and is disrupted during diabetes or cancer metabolic reprogramming.

For more information, please refer to:

http://faculty.sustech.edu.cn/raof/en/