Xiao Dong, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Masonic Institute on the Biology of Aging and Metabolism and the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Biotechnology from Zhejiang University, China in 2008, and PhD in Bioinformatics at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Science in 2013, studying genetic epidemiology and genomics. He joined the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 2013 for postdoc training, and since then, has been focused on studying the relationship between somatic mutations and aging. In 2021 Dr. Dong started his laboratory and continued his research in the same area at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Dr. Dong’s research focuses on developing novel sequencing technologies to analyze somatic mutations and epimutations in normal, noncancerous cells, and applying the technologies to quantitively interrogate these events during aging. Dr. Dong has contributed to the development of experimental and computational methods in single-cell whole-genome sequencing and bisulfite sequencing. In collaboration with others, he has shown that somatic mutation rate is almost 2 orders of magnitudes higher than germline mutation rate in humans and mice; somatic mutations accumulate with age in humans; and mutation burden negatively associates with species-specific lifespan in rodents. Dr Dong’s research has been funded by the US National Institutes of Health since 2019. He has published over 60 scientific papers, 3 software tools, and 2 databases.
Research Interests
My lab focuses on testing the mutation theory of aging: if accumulation of DNA mutations in normal somatic cells is a causal mechanism to age-related functional decline. We approach this by developing and applying state-of-the-art single-cell multi-omics technologies and machine learning algorithms to study humans of various age groups and age-related health conditions.