Dr Fei Lu

Group Leader Centre of Excellence for Plant and Microbial Science (CEPAMS)

Fei Lu is a plant geneticist, with expertise on population genetics, quantitative genetics, and statistical genomics.

Fei also loves computers and often gets involved in software development for genetic study.

Many important traits are complex and his group uses quantitative genetics and statistical genomics to understand the genetics shaping important agronomic traits of crops.

Currently, his group studies maize and wheat in the lab. Both are economically important, about two thirds of global cereal production are from these two crops.

As research model, they made multiple intriguing comparisons (e.g. C4 Vs C3, outcrossing Vs inbreeding, diploid Vs polyploid, etc.), representing typical characteristics of other plants, and they hope that research from the cross-species and well-perturbed system can also benefit genetic improvement of many other crops.

Before joining CEPAMS in 2017, he was in Cornell University, mostly working on maize quantitative genetics and informatics.

The tools he developed have been applied in hundreds of species. Over the past decade, Fei has worked on a wide range of crops, used various research approaches, which helped him to develop a deep understanding about the interaction between genotype, environment, ecosystem, evolution, and human activities and how the interaction contributes to phenotype of plants.

Enthusiastic about crop improvement, his group now is working on maize and wheat, trying to develop an effective functional genome prediction approach to pinpoint causal variants of important agronomic traits. The successful development of this approach will tremendously expand the application of genomic editing technologies and enable a brand new “cross-free” breeding.

Fei received his PhD. from Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGBD), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2010. Due to his excellent work in rice comparative genomics, he won the President Award for Outstanding Student and Award for Outstanding Graduate of CAS.

Publications:

‘Demographic modeling replaying the tape of wheat evolution’ – Nature Plants

‘Population genomics unravels the Holocene history of bread wheat and its relatives’