Xiaoning Lu, Ph.D., has joined North Dakota INBRE as the Proteomics Core director. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Lu earned a Ph.D. degree in analytical chemistry in 2002 at the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington and a research associate at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC, before joining UND. He has been working on cancer proteomics since 2003.

Lu has authored and co-authored numerous articles in peer-reviewed research journals and presented his research at scientific conferences. He has a patent in China with two other researchers on a novel detection technique for amperometric cells using capillary electrophoresis.

Rongying Wang, Ph.D., also joined the proteomics core and the Department of Pathology. Dr. Wang obtained a Ph.D. degree in analytical chemistry from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She worked for EnvrioData LLC, an environmental analysis company, before joining UND. She has a broad range of experience in analytical chemistry, including HPLC, capillary electrophoresis, GC-MS and LC-MS/MS.

Proteomics is a cutting-edge technology that examines the entire protein complement (proteome) or sub-proteome of a species related to its healthy and abnormal states. Since its introduction in the early 1990s, proteomics has become a core technology in life science, assisting researchers in understanding signal transduction, discovering biomarkers and identifying targets for new drugs.

The INBRE Proteomics Core Facility was opened in the spring of 2003 and recently updated under Lu’s direction. It includes a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer, the 4800 MALDI-TOF/TOF from Applied Biosystems/MDS SCIEX. The 4800 enables high-throughput protein identification and quantitation for discovery applications.

This facility provides investigators both inside and outside INBRE with instrumentation, expertise and training. It functions as a technical platform that helps develop a highly interactive and collaborative biomedical research group, and increases the competitiveness of the investigators through the services and the research resources of the core facility.

The facility also provides undergraduate students, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in the state with the opportunity to learn advanced proteomics technology.

Xiaoning Lu, Ph.D.

Rongying Wang, Ph.D.