Minkui Luo

Minkui Luo is a biochemist and professor of biochemistry at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His research interests include chemical biology and the study of posttranslational modifications in epigenetic signaling, with an emphasis on protein methyltransferases.

Education
Luo attended college at Fudan University and earned his PhD in Bioorganic and Bioinorganic Chemistry in 2005 from Princeton University, where he worked in the lab of Professor John T. Groves.

Career and research
From 2005 to 2008, Luo pursued postdoctoral studies at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the lab of Professor Vern Schramm. In 2008, Luo became a faculty member in the department of Molecular Pharmacology and Chemistry at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His group has pioneered the use of chemical genetic 'bump-hole' methodologies to identify the substrates of protein methyltransferases, an approach that requires engineering these enzymes to use a non-natural S-adenosyl methionine analogue as a cofactor. Luo's lab also has contributed to the development of new chemical probes of protein methyltransferases, enabling their function to be probed in vitro and in cells.

Notable papers
Web of Science lists 77 publications authored by Luo in peer-reviewed scientific journals that have been cited over 2000 times, leading to an h-index of 23. His lab's five most cited papers (>80 each) are:



Awards and honors

 * 2015 - Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry
 * 2014 - Clinical & Translational Science Center Novel Award, Weill Cornell Medical College
 * 2011 - Basil O'Connor Starter Scholar, March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation
 * 2010 - NIH Director's New Innovator Award (DP2)
 * 2009 - The V Scholar Award, the V Foundation for Cancer Research