Xiang-Jun Lu is a research scientist in the Bussemaker Lab. He received a BS in chemistry and an MS in computational chemistry from Nankai University in Tianjin, China. He obtained his PhD in computational chemistry in 1996 from the University of Sheffield. During his postdoctoral research at Rutgers University (1997-2002), he resolved the long-standing discrepancies among nucleic acid conformational analyses, which led to the establishment of a standard reference frame for the description of nucleic acid base pair geometry. He then developed the 3DNA suite of programs for the analysis, rebuilding, and visualization of three-dimensional nucleic acid structures. 

After leaving Rutgers, Dr. Lu worked first as a computational scientist at SAIC Frederick, Maryland (2003-2004), and thereafter as an associate research scientist at the Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University (2005-present). In Dr. Bussemaker’s laboratory at Columbia, he developed the REDUCE Suite of programs for analyzing gene expressions. Over the years, he has maintained 3DNA—initially as a sideline project, then as a full-time job since September 2011 with the support of an NIH R01 grant (GM096889). Dedicated to the “Continued Development and Maintenance of the 3DNA Suite of Programs,” the grant has enabled him to create DSSR, a new program for defining the secondary structures of RNA from three-dimensional coordinates. Recently, he developed SNAP, another new 3DNA program for the characterization of three-dimensional structures of nucleic acid-protein complexes. 3DNA-related news and information can be found on the 3DNA homepage. Questions and suggestions are always welcome on the 3DNA Forum. Dr. Lu’s research profile can be found at Google Scholar.