Wei Li is a principle investigator in Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and vice director of State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology. Wei received his B.S. from Wuhan University in 2006 and Ph.D. in 2012 from Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has published more than 70 scientific papers in highly reputable journals such as Nature, Cell, Nature Biotechnology, and has received a number of awards and honors, such as International Award of the Japanese Association for Laboratory Animal Science, Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Prize of the CAS, the Young Top-notch Talent of the “Ten thousand Talent Program”. Current interests in his laboratory include: (i) development of mammalian genome engineering technologies and synthetic biology. (ii) dissection of genetic and epigenetic basis of reproduction- and regeneration-related phenotypes. (iii) clinical application of gene therapy.

Balancing embryonic development through “imbalance”

Imbalanced allelic gene expression has been widely observed and plays important roles in mammalian development and disease progress. How it is established, regulated and functioning, remains to be explored. Here by combining the haploid stem cell and genome editing technologies, we identified the imprinting-related factors necessary for crossing same-sex reproduction barriers in mammals, and then established a unisexual reproduction method for producing normally growing bimaternal mice and live bipaternal mice. We also identified the aberrantly expressed non-canonical imprinting genes in cloned mice, which can significantly increase the animal cloning efficiency up to 14% after being rescued.