About State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics

State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics

The State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics is a national research laboratory at Hunan University in Changsha, Hunan, spanning the university's College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and its College of Biology. It brings together the two halves of analytical chemistry that its name announces: chemical and biological sensing — the design of sensors, probes and assays that detect molecules, cells and biological processes — and chemometrics, the mathematical and statistical treatment of chemical measurement data. Its research groups have been led by academician Ruqin Yu, the founder of its chemometrics school; by Kemin Wang, a leader of its biosensing and bioanalysis work; and by Jianhui Jiang, among others. Weihong Tan, the bioanalytical chemist known for DNA aptamers and molecular engineering, became the laboratory's director in March 2010. In China's reorganisation of the state key laboratory system the laboratory has been presented under the shortened name State Key Laboratory of Chemo and Biosensing, and its Nature Index profile under that name records one of the largest outputs of any laboratory in this series.

Setting at Hunan University in Changsha

The laboratory's address in its publications is the College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and College of Biology of Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan 410082, together in many papers with the university's Collaborative Innovation Center for Chemistry and Molecular Medicine. That dual college base is structural, not incidental: chemo/biosensing requires chemists who can design molecular recognition and signal transduction, and biologists who can pose meaningful questions about cells and organisms, while chemometrics supplies the data analysis that turns instrument output into chemical knowledge. Hunan University's analytical chemistry tradition, built over decades in Changsha, gave the laboratory both its founding generation and its training pipeline, and the laboratory in turn became the platform through which that tradition was organised as a national centre.

Ruqin Yu and the chemometrics school

The chemometrics half of the laboratory descends from Ruqin Yu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences whose publishing career, by the count of one research database, spans more than four decades and over a thousand publications, concentrated in analytical chemistry, spectroscopy and chemometric analysis. Yu's group at the laboratory made multi-way data analysis — the treatment of data that arrive as three-way or higher arrays from modern analytical instruments — a Chinese speciality. A 2009 overview by Hai-Long Wu, Yu and colleagues, describing the group's work in the State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics, summarised its programme: building canonical symbol systems for multi-way analysis, uncovering the mathematical cyclic symmetry property of trilinear and multilinear decomposition, proposing a series of multi-way calibration algorithms, exploring rank estimation for three-way trilinear data arrays, and analysing different application systems, in a progression from second-order to third-order data. The practical value of this mathematics is what chemists call the second-order advantage: the ability to quantify an analyte accurately even in the presence of unknown interferences, a common situation in food, environmental, pharmaceutical and traditional Chinese medicine analysis, all of which appear among Yu's recorded research topics alongside metabolomics and mass spectrometry studies.

Chemical and biological sensing

The sensing half of the laboratory designs the measurement systems that generate such data. The research record for this profile describes its fields as analytical chemistry, chemical and biological sensing, and single-molecule and single-particle imaging. Its groups work on fluorescent and nanomaterial-based sensors, on electrochemical and optical detection, and on biosensors that report on molecules inside living cells. Work associated with Kemin Wang's group illustrates the range: amplified fluorescence resonance energy transfer nanoflares — nanomachines powered by endogenous messenger RNA — for imaging microRNA inside cells, published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition in 2020; coacervate protocells and giant coacervate vesicles as cytomimetic models, published in Nature Chemistry and the Journal of the American Chemical Society; and nanoplatforms for cancer theranostics that combine diagnosis and therapy. Wang's recorded research interests span advanced biosensing and bioanalysis, DNA and nucleic acid chemistry, biosensors and analytical detection, extracellular vesicles in disease and RNA interference and gene delivery, with frequent collaborators including Xiaohai Yang, Jin Huang, Jianbo Liu, Xiaoxiao He and Qing Wang.

Weihong Tan, aptamers and molecular engineering

Weihong Tan, who became director of the laboratory in March 2010 according to Hunan University's biography, brought a further signature programme. Tan was born in Yiyang, Hunan, in 1960, graduated in chemistry from Hunan Normal University in 1982, took a master's degree at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Coal Chemistry in 1985 and a doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Michigan in 1992, and built a parallel career at the University of Florida, where he was a University Distinguished Professor. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015 and of the World Academy of Sciences in 2016. His group pioneered whole-cell systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment — cell-SELEX — a method for selecting DNA aptamers against specific cell lines, and developed aptamer-based molecular designs for theranostics and bioanalysis; Hunan University summarises his focus as bioanalytical chemistry and chemical biology, specialising in bioanalysis, molecular engineering, DNA nanotechnology and biosensors, with more than 500 peer-reviewed papers in journals including Science, PNAS and Nature publications. His honours include the Beckman Young Investigator Award, the Pittcon Achievement Award and the Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award. Tan's programme — aptamers that recognise cancer cells, molecular probes and DNA nanostructures — connected the laboratory directly to molecular medicine.

Single-molecule and single-particle imaging

A further direction named in the laboratory's research record is single-molecule and single-particle imaging: techniques that observe one molecule or one nanoparticle at a time rather than averaging over billions. For sensing, this matters because the behaviour of an individual probe — its blinking, diffusion, binding and signal changes — carries information that ensemble measurements hide, and because counting single molecules offers a route to the most sensitive detection possible. The laboratory's work on functionalised quantum dots illustrates the style: a switch-on biosensor built from quinone glycoside-functionalised quantum dots, designed so that a specific lectin binding to clustered glycosides significantly recovers the signal, was published in Analytical Chemistry with authors from the laboratory including Weihong Tan and Ronghua Yang. Imaging and sensing at this scale link the laboratory's chemistry to cell biology, since the probes are ultimately used to watch processes inside living systems.

Groups, people and training

The research record for this profile names research groups led by Kemin Wang, Jianhui Jiang and academician Ruqin Yu, and the laboratory's publications add a wider community: Hai-Long Wu in chemometrics, Xiaohai Yang and Jin Huang in biosensing, Ronghua Yang in molecular probes, and Weihong Tan in aptamers and molecular engineering. As a state key laboratory within a university, it trains doctoral and master's students across chemistry and biology, and its open project funds have supported outside researchers — published papers in unrelated fields acknowledge support from the laboratory's open project foundation, evidence of the openness that the state key laboratory system requires. The laboratory's senior figures have been recognised by their own community in a fitting way: at the Fourteenth National Chemical Sensors Academic Conference, Ruqin Yu received the conference's first SKLCBSC Lifetime Achievement Award — an award named for this laboratory — and Kemin Wang received its Outstanding Achievement Award, at a meeting whose theme was innovating biosensing technique, and which determined that its next session would be organised by Hunan University.

Output and standing

The laboratory's reorganised form, the State Key Laboratory of Chemo and Biosensing at Hunan University, records in the Nature Index a twelve-month output of several hundred articles with the largest shares in chemistry, followed by health sciences, applied sciences and biological sciences — a distribution that mirrors the laboratory's own structure, in which chemical measurement is applied to biological and medical questions. Research databases profile its leading scientists among China's most productive analytical chemists: Ruqin Yu with publications spanning from the 1980s to the present across analytical chemistry and spectroscopy, and Kemin Wang with a large body of work in biosensing, bioanalysis and nanomaterials published regularly in Analytical Chemistry and related journals. The laboratory's name appears as the affiliation on thousands of papers in journals such as Analytical Chemistry, Angewandte Chemie, Talanta, Biosensors and Bioelectronics and the Journal of the American Chemical Society, making it one of the most visible analytical chemistry addresses in China.

The two halves as one discipline

What distinguishes this laboratory from a conventional analytical chemistry department is the deliberate joining of its two halves. Chemometrics without sensors is mathematics in search of data; sensing without chemometrics produces signals that complex samples render ambiguous. By housing Ruqin Yu's multi-way calibration school in the same laboratory as the biosensing groups of Kemin Wang and Jianhui Jiang and the aptamer programme of Weihong Tan, Hunan University created an institution that works the full chain of measurement: recognising a target molecule with an aptamer or probe, transducing that recognition into a signal with a nanomaterial or quantum dot, imaging it at single-particle resolution, and extracting quantitative truth from multi-way data even when interferences are unknown. That completeness, pursued in Changsha across the colleges of chemistry and biology, is the laboratory's contribution to analytical science — and the reason its name couples chemo/biosensing and chemometrics in a single title.

Place in Chinese analytical chemistry

Founded on Hunan University's analytical chemistry tradition, led in its chemometrics by an academician whose school defined multi-way analysis in China, in its sensing by researchers recognised with their field's lifetime achievement honours, and directed from 2010 by one of the world's leading aptamer chemists, the State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics stands among China's defining institutions for measurement science. Its reorganised successor name shortens the title, but the original name remains the accurate description of what the laboratory does: it senses, and it computes, and it has taught a generation of Chinese analytical chemists to do both at once.