About State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology

State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology

The State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology is a national research laboratory in Beijing, China, jointly hosted by three of the country's leading life-science institutions: the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Tsinghua University and Peking University. It studies the biological membrane — the boundary that defines every cell and organelle — and the proteins embedded in it that control transport, signalling and energy conversion. Its official site is hosted through Tsinghua University, and it is counted as one of the three state key laboratories at the Institute of Zoology, alongside the laboratories for stem cell and reproductive biology and for integrated pest management. Few Chinese laboratories embody inter-institutional collaboration as literally as this one: a single national laboratory whose divisions sit inside a CAS institute and two great universities at once.

From biomembrane laboratory to membrane biology: 1988 to 2015

The laboratory was originally named the State Key Laboratory of Biomembrane and Membrane Biotechnology. According to Peking University's School of Life Sciences, it was established in 1988, jointly founded by the Institute of Zoology, Tsinghua University and Peking University, and it passed national inspection in 1990, after which it was opened to host domestic and international researchers. In 2015 it was renamed to its current, shorter name, the State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology — a change that reflected the broadening of its science from applied membrane biotechnology toward the full fundamental biology of membranes. The laboratory was consecutively rated "Excellent" in the national evaluations of state key laboratories in 2011 and 2016, a distinction reserved for the strongest performers in China's periodic national assessments. Following the restructuring of state key laboratories announced in 2024, Peking University and Tsinghua University continue their close collaboration to jointly host the successor Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology, carrying the partnership into the reorganised national system.

Leadership across three hosts

Peking University's account records that over some 37 years the laboratory's Peking University division has been led by four directors — Professors Jinrong Liu, Hongcai Wu, Shiqiang Wang and Ning Gao — and describes the division as having cultivated a professional and dynamic research team with strong expertise, balanced age distribution and active academic interaction. That continuity of leadership across nearly four decades is itself part of the laboratory's story: membrane biology is a field in which methods, from classical biochemistry to cryo-electron microscopy, have been transformed several times over, and the laboratory has renewed its leadership and its techniques while keeping its founding question — how membranes and their proteins work — at the centre. The tripartite hosting arrangement means leadership and governance are shared across the Institute of Zoology and the two universities, with each host contributing its own strengths: the Institute of Zoology's zoological and cell-biological depth, Tsinghua's structural biology and life-science institutes, and Peking University's School of Life Sciences, itself approaching its centenary and housing dozens of independent research groups.

Why membranes matter

A biological membrane is far more than a bag wall. The lipid bilayer separates the inside of a cell from its environment and encloses organelles such as mitochondria, the endoplasmic reticulum, the Golgi apparatus and lysosomes, and the proteins embedded in those membranes perform much of the cell's practical work: they transport ions, nutrients and metabolites, they receive and transduce signals from hormones, neurotransmitters and growth factors, they generate and store energy, and they mediate fusion and fission events that move cargo around the cell. When membrane proteins fail, the consequences include metabolic disease, neurological disorders, immune dysfunction and cancer, which is why membrane proteins are also the targets of a large share of modern medicines. The laboratory's research, as summarised in its profile record, covers membrane proteins, organelle biology and signal transduction — three themes that together span the membrane's structure, its internal organisation and its role as the cell's communications surface.

Membrane proteins and structural biology

The first research pillar is the structure and mechanism of membrane proteins themselves. Modern membrane-protein science depends on determining three-dimensional structures at near-atomic resolution and then testing how those structures explain transport and gating. The wider field was transformed by the cryo-electron microscopy resolution revolution, which made it possible to visualise membrane proteins embedded in lipid-like environments without crystallisation, and laboratories of this type combine cryo-EM with biochemistry, biophysics and cell biology to move from a structure to a mechanism: how a channel selects its ion, how a transporter changes shape to move its substrate, how a receptor couples binding outside the cell to signalling inside it. The laboratory's output, tracked by the Nature Index, is concentrated in biological and health sciences, reflecting this structural and mechanistic core. In the Nature Index window from July 2025 to June 2026, the laboratory recorded an overall Count of 150 articles with a Share of 35.68, with biological sciences and health sciences the largest subject areas — figures that place it among the most productive membrane-focused research units in China.

Organelle biology

The second pillar is organelle biology: the study of how the membrane-bound compartments inside the cell form, maintain their identity, communicate and are quality-controlled. Organelles are not static containers. The endoplasmic reticulum folds and checks proteins, mitochondria remodel their internal membranes as energy demand changes, endosomes and lysosomes sort and degrade cargo, and contact sites between organelles exchange lipids and calcium signals. Research in this area asks how these dynamics are regulated and what happens when they break down, including in the formation of membraneless organelles — condensates that organise biochemistry without a surrounding membrane, a topic on which Institute of Zoology researchers have also published. Situating organelle biology inside a membrane laboratory makes conceptual sense: the same lipid and protein machinery that builds the plasma membrane also builds, fuses and repairs the cell's internal membrane system, and a laboratory that understands one is well placed to understand the other.

Signal transduction at the membrane

The third pillar is signal transduction. Most signals a cell receives — hormones, growth factors, neurotransmitters, antigens, mechanical and environmental cues — are first detected at a membrane, by receptors whose extracellular side binds the signal and whose intracellular side initiates a cascade. Understanding transduction therefore means understanding membrane proteins as machines that convert information across a barrier, and it connects the laboratory's basic work directly to pharmacology, immunology and neuroscience. The Nature Index collaboration data underline how networked this science is: the laboratory's top domestic collaborators by shared output are Peking University and Tsinghua University themselves, followed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Tsinghua–Peking University Joint Center for Life Sciences, with international collaborators including the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Membrane biology advances through exactly this kind of structural, cellular and computational collaboration across institutions and countries.

The host institutions

Each host brings a distinct inheritance. The Institute of Zoology traces its history to the Fan Memorial Institute of Biology founded in 1928, counts Bing Zhi among its founders and is one of China's oldest zoological research institutions; today it runs three state key laboratories and two CAS key laboratories and works across cell programming and reprogramming, reproductive and developmental regulation, stem cells and regenerative medicine and integrated pest management, with membrane research woven through its history of work on membraneless organelles and cell biology. Peking University's School of Life Sciences descends from a Biology Department established in 1925, strengthened in 1952 by the merger of biology expertise from Tsinghua and Yenching universities, and now operates core facilities in genomics, microscopy including cryo-electron microscopy, biochemistry, proteomics and metabolomics. Tsinghua hosts the laboratory's web presence and contributes its own life-science and structural-biology community. A joint laboratory can draw samples, facilities and students from all three, which is precisely the model China's state key laboratory system was designed to encourage.

Standing and outlook

Judged by the measures its hosts publish, the laboratory has sustained excellence over an unusually long period: founded in the first great wave of Chinese state key laboratories in the late 1980s, opened in 1990, rated excellent in consecutive national evaluations in 2011 and 2016, renamed and refocused in 2015, and carried forward through the 2024 restructuring with its university partnership intact. Its scientific agenda — membrane proteins, organelle biology and signal transduction — sits at the centre of modern cell biology and at the origin of a large fraction of drug targets, so its work speaks simultaneously to fundamental questions about how cells are organised and to practical questions in medicine and biotechnology. As structural methods continue to improve and as membrane research merges with condensate biology, spatial proteomics and computational protein design, the laboratory's three-host structure in Beijing remains a durable platform for the next generation of discoveries about the boundary that makes cellular life possible.