About State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology

State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology

The State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology, widely known by its short name SRLab, is a national research laboratory hosted by the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Its address within the institute is given in the source profile as 1 Beichen West Road, Beijing, an address it shares with the wider Institute of Zoology campus in the Chaoyang District of the capital. The laboratory is one of three state key laboratories at the Institute of Zoology, alongside laboratories devoted to membrane biology and to the integrated management of pest insects and rodents, and that concentration helps explain why the institute is able to sustain long programmes in developmental biology, reproduction and regenerative medicine under one roof.

As its name indicates, the laboratory joins two fields that are often pursued separately. Stem cell biology asks how cells maintain pluripotency, how they are reprogrammed from one identity to another, and how they can be directed to form specialised tissues. Reproductive biology asks how germ cells form, how fertilisation and early embryonic development proceed, and how reproduction is regulated across the life span. SRLab was created precisely to hold those questions together, so that discoveries about the earliest stages of life can inform regenerative medicine, and so that clinical problems in reproduction can be traced back to fundamental mechanisms in the cell.

Origins and establishment in 1991

The laboratory was established in 1991 by merging two existing units of the Institute of Zoology: the Laboratory of Reproductive Biology and the Laboratory of Endocrinology. That merger is central to its identity. Reproductive biology brought expertise in gametes, embryos and animal reproduction, while endocrinology brought expertise in the hormonal regulation of reproduction and development. Combining them created a single platform in which a reproductive process could be studied from the level of hormonal signalling through to the behaviour of individual cells and embryos.

The date matters in the history of Chinese life science. The early 1990s were a period in which the state key laboratory system was being consolidated as China's principal vehicle for stable, long-term support for basic research, with laboratories attached to strong host institutes and universities rather than operating as free-standing bodies. A laboratory formed in 1991 from established institute groups therefore began not as an experiment but as a consolidation, with staff, animal facilities and research programmes already in place. The later addition of stem cell biology to the laboratory's name and mission reflected a further consolidation, as work on embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells and related reprogramming methods grew out of the laboratory's existing strengths in embryos and germ cells.

An earlier name is also attested in biographical sources for its director. Qi Zhou is described as director of the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology, formerly the State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Biology. That wording captures the transition: a laboratory founded around reproductive biology broadened, over time, into a laboratory in which stem cells and regeneration stand alongside reproduction in the formal title.

Host institution: the Institute of Zoology

The Institute of Zoology is one of the oldest research institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with a history traced in institute publications to the Fan Memorial Institute of Biology founded in 1928. Over nearly a century it has developed from zoological taxonomy and faunistics into a broad institute covering animal science, ecology, pest management, developmental biology and biomedical research. For SRLab, that breadth is a practical advantage. Work on stem cells and reproduction requires animal models, comparative biology and expertise in physiology and genetics, all of which exist elsewhere in the same institute.

The institute context also shapes how the laboratory's results are described in the wider literature. Papers from SRLab groups routinely carry the double affiliation of the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology and the Institute of Zoology, often together with the CAS Institute for Stem Cell and Regeneration and the Key Laboratory of Organ Regeneration and Reconstruction. A 2024 study on stem cell transplantation and reproductive lifespan in cynomolgus monkeys, published in Cell Discovery, lists exactly that combination of affiliations for its Beijing authors, illustrating how the laboratory sits inside a layered system of CAS platforms devoted to regeneration.

Being in Beijing places the laboratory within the capital's Zhongguancun and northern academic corridor, close to Peking University, Tsinghua University, the Institute of Biophysics and other CAS institutes. That proximity supports collaboration in imaging, genomics and primate research, all of which are relevant to a laboratory whose work ranges from mouse genetics to non-human primate models.

Leadership under Qi Zhou

The laboratory is directed by Qi Zhou, a biologist whose career illustrates the laboratory's twin themes of cloning and stem cells. Zhou received his bachelor's degree in 1991, his master's degree in 1994 and his doctorate in histology and embryology in 1996, all from Northeast Agricultural University, according to his published biographical profile. He then undertook postdoctoral research at the Institute of Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and in 1999 joined Jean-Paul Renard's group at the Developmental Biology and Reproduction Unit of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, known as INRA.

In France, Zhou led researchers working on an animal cloning project and, among other animals, produced the world's first cloned rat, an achievement recalled in multiple biographical accounts. In 2002, supported by the CAS Hundred Talents Program, he returned to China to join the Institute of Zoology as a professor and set up his own research laboratory. He received the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2005, became deputy director of the reproductive biology laboratory in 2004 and its director in December 2011 on the chronology given in his Wikipedia biography, and was elected a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015. He has also served as deputy director and then director of the Institute of Zoology and, from November 2020, as a vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

That trajectory matters for understanding SRLab because Zhou's group moved deliberately from cloning into stem cell biology. His published profile states that after returning to China he focused on stem cell research, leading projects on the mechanisms of cell reprogramming and the pluripotency of embryonic stem cells, while also promoting the translation of stem cells towards clinical applications. The laboratory's programme can be read as the institutional form of that same move.

Stem cell biology and reprogramming

Reprogramming is one of the laboratory's defining themes. In modern stem cell biology, reprogramming means returning a specialised cell to a pluripotent state, or converting one cell type directly into another. The best-known method produces induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, which behave in many respects like embryonic stem cells but are derived from ordinary somatic cells.

A landmark associated with Zhou and with Fanyi Zeng of Shanghai Jiao Tong University was the creation in 2009 of the first viable mouse from induced pluripotent stem cells, reported in Nature. A Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences account describes how the teams optimised induction protocols and established new induction and culture methods for iPS cells, injected those cells into tetraploid blastocysts, and obtained healthy iPS-generated mice and offspring through tetraploid complementation. The first such mouse was named Xiaoxiao, literally Tiny, in the hope, as the bulletin puts it, that a small step by a tiny mouse could move stem cell research forward. Tetraploid complementation is a stringent test, because the resulting animal is derived essentially entirely from the injected pluripotent cells, so success demonstrated full developmental pluripotency rather than a partial approximation.

Work of this kind gives SRLab a distinctive place in the international history of pluripotency. Many laboratories could generate iPS cells; far fewer could demonstrate, in a whole animal, that those cells could support complete development. That result underpins later uses of pluripotent cells in disease modelling and regenerative medicine, because confidence in a cell line depends on exactly this kind of rigorous functional test.

Haploid stem cells and reproductive innovation

A second line of work for which Zhou's team is widely cited concerns haploid stem cells: stem cells carrying only one set of chromosomes rather than the usual two. Because a haploid cell exposes recessive genetic effects directly, such cells are powerful tools for genetic screening, and because they can in some settings substitute functionally for gametes, they challenge conventional accounts of reproduction.

Zhou's published profile and subsequent reviews record that in 2012 his team proved the existence and utility of haploid stem cells that could reproduce and differentiate, and later created heterozygous diploid embryonic stem cells derived from haploid work, revealing new mechanisms for regulating stem cell development. A 2018 study in Cell Stem Cell, co-authored by Zhou and colleagues at the Institute of Zoology, showed that by modifying genetic imprints — DNA methylation sites — in parthenogenetic and androgenetic haploid embryonic stem cells, the cells could be functionally transformed so that live mouse offspring could be produced descending from either two egg cells or two sperm cells. That experiment did not change clinical practice, and it should not be described as if it did, but as basic science it demonstrated in an unusually direct way how genomic imprinting governs mammalian reproduction.

For a laboratory of stem cell and reproductive biology, the haploid programme is emblematic: a question that begins in reproductive biology, about what sperm and eggs uniquely contribute, becomes a stem cell technology, and the technology in turn becomes a way to test fundamental reproductive theory.

Animal cloning and primate models

Animal cloning remains part of the laboratory's stated research scope, and it connects SRLab to a longer Chinese tradition in somatic cell nuclear transfer. In that technique, the nucleus of a somatic cell is transferred into an egg cell whose own nucleus has been removed, and the reconstructed cell is prompted to develop as an embryo. Zhou's early work in France on rat cloning belongs to this tradition, and the laboratory's Beijing programme has continued to use cloning and embryo manipulation as tools for producing animal models and for studying early development.

Primate models are especially important in reproductive and regenerative research because mice, for all their genetic convenience, differ from humans in reproductive physiology, gestation and ageing. Publications affiliated to SRLab include work in cynomolgus monkeys, a macaque species widely used in biomedical research. The 2024 Cell Discovery study already mentioned examined the dynamics of ovarian reserve in perimenopausal women and then, in naturally ageing cynomolgus monkeys, found that transplanting human embryonic stem cell-derived mesenchymal stem cell-like cells, called M cells by the authors, into ageing ovaries reduced ovarian fibrosis and DNA damage, improved hormone secretion and fertility, and was followed by the birth of a healthy baby monkey. Single-cell RNA sequencing and in vitro validation in that study pointed to reduced apoptosis, oxidative damage, inflammation and fibrosis in granulosa and stromal cells after transplantation.

Results of that kind must be read as preclinical research, not as an available therapy. Their significance for the laboratory's profile is different: they show SRLab working at the junction of its two named fields, using a stem cell-derived product to address a reproductive condition — ovarian ageing — in the animal model closest to human reproductive biology that its researchers routinely use.

Reproductive biology and regenerative medicine

Reproductive biology at SRLab covers the formation and quality of gametes, fertilisation, implantation, embryonic development and the ageing of the reproductive system. Regenerative medicine covers the use of stem cells and their derivatives to repair or replace damaged tissue. The laboratory treats those agendas as connected rather than as separate portfolios, because the early embryo is itself the natural example of cells generating an entire organism, and because many regenerative strategies borrow the signals that govern embryonic development.

The ovarian ageing study is one illustration. Other institute-level accounts of stem cell and regenerative medicine work associated with CAS in this period describe the broader environment in which SRLab operates, including collagen scaffold and cell transplantation approaches to spinal cord injury and work on endometrial damage pursued elsewhere in the academy. Those neighbouring programmes are not SRLab's own results, and this profile does not attribute them to the laboratory, but they show the translational setting: a national push, during the 2010s, to move stem cell science from demonstrations of pluripotency towards defined cell products tested in animal models of injury and disease.

Zhou himself has spoken publicly about that translational boundary. In reporting in Nature in 2015 on China's new regulations for stem cell research, Zhou was quoted as waiting for clear guidelines so that work could move responsibly from animal models towards human studies, describing unpublished work in which dopamine-producing neurons derived from stem cells had been implanted into monkeys chemically induced to show Parkinson-like symptoms, with some improvement observed, and saying that he believed it was time to begin careful clinical research. The episode is a useful corrective to exaggerated accounts of regenerative medicine: the laboratory's own director framed translation as something that required regulation and stepwise evidence.

Place among the Institute of Zoology's three laboratories

Sources on the Institute of Zoology consistently describe SRLab as one of three state key laboratories at the institute. The other two, as profiled elsewhere in this directory, are the State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology and the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents. The trio spans the institute's range, from cell membranes and signalling, through whole-animal reproduction and regeneration, to insects, rodents and pest ecology.

That internal structure has a scientific logic. Membrane biology provides molecular and cellular foundations; stem cell and reproductive biology works at the level of cells, embryos and organisms; and pest management applies zoological knowledge to agriculture and public health. For graduate students and visiting researchers, the arrangement means that a project begun at SRLab can draw on neighbouring expertise in imaging, animal ecology and physiology without leaving the institute. For the institute, the three laboratories together justify its claim, repeated in its own historical reviews, to have made contributions across cell programming and reprogramming, reproductive and developmental regulation, and stem cell and regenerative medicine.

Research culture, training and significance

Like other Chinese state key laboratories, SRLab combines permanent research groups with graduate training and postdoctoral research, within the degree system of its host institute and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Zhou himself served as vice president of that university from January 2016, a role that reflects the close integration, across CAS, between institute research and graduate education. The laboratory's output is measured in the usual currencies of such a system: peer-reviewed papers in journals such as Nature, Cell and Cell Stem Cell, competitive national funding, academy honours, and the training of researchers who go on to lead groups elsewhere.

Its wider significance can be stated without exaggeration. First, SRLab helped establish, through the 2009 tetraploid complementation mouse, that Chinese groups could set the standard of proof in pluripotency research rather than merely follow it. Second, its haploid stem cell work opened a distinctive experimental route into genetics and imprinting that few laboratories worldwide pursued as persistently. Third, by keeping reproduction and regeneration in a single laboratory, it preserved a connection that is scientifically productive: the mechanisms that create life at its start are among the best guides to repairing tissue later in life. For readers of this directory, SRLab is therefore best understood not as a general biology institute but as a focused national laboratory, founded in 1991 from two older Institute of Zoology units, led by cloning and stem cell scientist Qi Zhou, and devoted to understanding how mammalian life begins and how stem cells might one day help sustain and restore it.