Dr. Luo graduated in Molecular Genetics in 1993 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He became a postdoctoral fellow at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in 1993, and then a Research Associate in Dr. Allan Bradley at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Baylor College of Medicine in 1996.
He is the recipients of the Howard Temin Award from the National Cancer Institute in 2000, the Basil O'Connor Starter Scholar Award from the March of Dimes Foundation in 2001, and the Searle Scholar Award in 2001.
He has served as an Associate Editor for the journal of Current Genomics since 1999.
Dr. Luo joined the Department of Genetics and the Ireland Cancer Center at CWRU and University Hospitals of Cleveland in May, 2000.
Research Information
Research Interests
My laboratory uses mice to model human diseases and to conduct other aspects of genetic studies, including gene identification.
We are currently using knockout mouse models to study a unique class of human syndromes that are caused by mutations in RecQ DNA helicase homologues.
Defects in RecQ DNA helicase homologues in these human syndromes have led to genomic instability and cancer predisposition and a great variety of other abnormalities.
We are particularly interested in studying how defects in individual RecQ helicase can lead to specific disease phenotypes in these distinct yet similar syndromes. A mouse model for both Bloom and Rothmund-Thomson syndromes are now being studied in the laboratory.
We are also continuing to further develop the Sleeping Beauty (SB) transposon as an insertional mutagen for mouse genetic study. The SB transposon is the only known active DNA transposon in mice. We are currently using this transposon system to set up transposon-tagged mutagenesis strategies for phenotype-driven genetic screens in mice to identify novel candidates genes for cancer as well as other human diseases.