Research Area
Our research interest is focused on discovering, understanding and application of extremophiles. Three aspects are involved: ecology and taxonomy of extremophiles, physiological mechanisms of extremophiles’ adaptation to extreme environments, and exploration of novel functionality of extremophiles for application.

Current Research
Our group has maintained an active research on fundamental and practical understanding of extremophiles. Our current activities within this research area include:
(1) Diversity and Systematics of Extremophiles Developing novel procedures including high-throughput methods for accessing the diversity of extremophile resources in soda lakes, hot springs, petroleum reservoirs and subsurface of saline lake, isolating and identifying novel extremophiles from these extreme environments, screening thermophiles and alkaliphiles for biomass utilization, biochemicals/biofuels production.and MEOR.
(2) Discovering and Engineering of Extreme Hydrolases Screening novel genes of extreme hydrolases involved in renewable biomass processing through coupling metagenomic cloning, gene-specific PCR, shotgun cloning, genomics and bioinformatics techniques with high-throughput screening methods; improving the performances of specific hydrolases for practical application through random mutagenesis, rational design and directed evolution techniques.
(3) Structure and Function of Extremozymes Alkaline/acidic mannanases and thermophilic amylase/glucosidase are selected as research models to investigate the relationship between protein sequence, structure and function. Specific amino acid residue functions will be related to pH/temperature stability and activity features of the enzymes; crystal structures of the recombinant mannanase/glucosidase and several site-specific mutants will be obtained and analyzed to understand the basis of the stability and activity under rigorous conditions.
(4) Molecular Basis for the Alkaliphily of Alkaliphiles Developing Alkalimonas amylolyticus as a model system for investigation on alkaliphily of alkaliphiles, isolating pH resistance-related genes from genomic DNA libraries by complement screening assay, identifying membrane proteins in A. amylolytica responsible for adaptation to alkaline condition by the differential proteomics techniques, evaluating their potential for improving salt and alkaline resistance of agriculture crops.
(5) Comparative and Functional Genomics of Extremophiles Sequencing the genomes of alkaliphilic A. amylolyticus; annotating genome sequences with biological functions in A. amylolyticus; developing microchip-based detection techniques to explore and define the important genes involved in utilization of complex carbohydrate substrates and pathways of carbohydrate catabolism and biochemicals production; developing differential proteomics techniques to identify the important proteins involved in carbohydrate transport and utilization; integrating data generated from genomics, proteomics, comparative and functional genomics to elucidate enzymes and pathways for carbohydrate catabolism and biochemicals synthesis and mechanisms for carbohydrate transport in extremophiles; developing novel enzymes and processes for industrial application.