Dr. Peng Xiong currently serves as a Special-Term Research Fellow at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). An alumnus of USTC, he earned his Bachelor's degree in 2009 and Ph.D. in 2015, subsequently conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan (USA), USTC, and Griffith University (Australia). In 2021, he co-founded Shanghai Zhiyu Biotechnology Co., Ltd. as Chief Technology Officer before joining USTC's Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research (School of Biomedical Engineering) in 2023. His pioneering research focuses on developing statistical force fields for structure modeling and de novo design of proteins and nucleic acids. Notably, he created ABACUS—China's first proprietary protein sequence design software—and led the team that secured first place in RNA structure prediction at CASP15 (Critical Assessment of  protein Structure Prediction), the premier global competition in computational structural biology.

Career

2023/03-Current， USTC，Special-Term Research Fellow

2021/05-2023/03，Shanghai Zhiyu Biotechnology Co., Ltd.，CTO

2018/05-2021/05，Griffith University (Australia)，Postdoctoral Fellow

2016/08-2018/05，USTC，Postdoctoral Fellow

2015/06-2016/06，University of Michigan (USA)，Postdoctoral Fellow

Email

xiongxp@ustc.edu.cn

Research Interests

1. RNA 3D structure prediction

2. Protein design

3. Design of functional RNA molecules and protein-RNA interactions

Awards

1st Place, RNA category, CASP15(2022)

Main Publications

1.Peng Xiong*, Meng Wang*, Xiaoqun Zhou, Tongchuan Zhang, Jiahai Zhang, Quan Chen, and Haiyan Liu. "Protein design with a comprehensive statistical energy function and boosted by experimental selection for foldability." Nature communications 5 (2014).

2.Xiaoqun Zhou, Peng Xiong, Meng Wang, Rongsheng Ma, Jiahai Zhang, Quan Chen, and Haiyan Liu. "Proteins of well-defined structures can be designed without backbone readjustment by a statistical model." Journal of Structural Biology 196, no. 3 (2016): 350-357

3. Peng Xiong, Chengxin Zhang, Wei Zheng, and Yang Zhang. "BindProfX: Assessing mutation-induced binding affinity change by protein interface profiles with pseudo counts." Journal of Molecular Biology (2016).

4. Peng Xiong, Quan Chen, and Haiyan Liu. "Computational Protein Design Under a Given Backbone Structure with the ABACUS Statistical Energy Function." Methods Mol Biol1529, 217-226 (2017).

5. Peng Xiong, Xiuhong Hu, Bin Huang, Jiahai Zhang, Quan Chen, and Haiyan Liu. "Increasing the efficiency and accuracy of the ABACUS protein sequence design method." Bioinformatics 36, no. 1 (2020).

6.  Zhe Zhang*, Peng Xiong*, Tongchuan Zhang, Junfeng Wang, Jian Zhan and Yaoqi Zhou, Accurate inference of the full base-pairing structure of RNA by deep mutational scanning and covariation-induced deviation of activity, Nucleic Acid Research (2020).

7. Peng Xiong , Ruibo Wu, Jian Zhan and Yaoqi Zhou. Pairing a high-resolution statistical potential with a nucleobase-centric sampling algorithm for improving RNA model refinement, Nature Communications (2021).