Yiliang Ding

Yiliang Ding has been a group leader with tenure at the John Innes Centre since 2014, working on the functional roles of the RNA structure in living cells. She has also been an Honorary Group Leader at the Babraham Institute and an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia since 2024.

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Career and research
Yiliang spent two months in the lab of David Lilley at the University of Dundee between November and December 2009. Prior to her move to the John Innes Centre as a group leader, Yiliang worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar at Penn State University, where she worked on the structural folding of RNA under the Human Frontier Science Program Grant from 2010 to 2013. Yiliang obtained the David Phillips Fellowship and started her own group at the John Innes Centre in 2014. She was granted tenure at the John Innes Centre in 2019. Yiliang's group researches RNA structure and post-transcriptional gene regulations. Her group’s research on nucleic acid chemistry and RNA biology focuses on understanding the dynamics of RNA structure in living cells. Yiliang develops new approaches for revealing in vivo RNA structurome. In particular her work on a high throughput method, Structure-seq, to analyse one of the first two genome-wide in vivo RNA structure maps, was published in Nature in 2013. This paper "In vivo genome-wide profiling of RNA secondary structure reveals novel regulatory features" has been widely cited  as a method for in vivo RNA structural analysis.

Since 2014, Yiliang's group has been studying the functional roles of RNA structure in diverse biological processes such as mRNA processing (splicing and polyadenylation), phase separation, translation, and RNA degradation. Yiliang's group has also developed new methods to reveal the existence of tertiary RNA G-quadruplex structures in eukaryotes and uncovered that RNA G-quadruplex structure serves as a molecular marker to facilitate plant adaptation to the cold during evolution. Recently, Yiliang's group has developed the single-molecule RNA structure profiling method that is capable of dissecting individual RNA structure conformation in living cells for the first time. The group revealed the functional importance of RNA structure in long noncoding RNAs. She is a member of the editorial board of Nucleic Acids Research.

Awards and honours
In January 2024 Yiliang Ding was one of the nine recipients of the 2024 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the UK and is the first UK plant scientist to receive the award.