Hansong Ma moves lab to Birmingham

We congratulate Hansong Ma on her well-deserved position as a Professor of Genetics at the University of Birmingham, where she and her lab have moved. Whilst we will miss her energy and enthusiasm, we are proud of her achievements and those of her lab over the last 6 years. We wish them all the best for the future.

Hansong studied the host-pathogen interaction for her DPhil at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Prof Robin May. She then joined Prof Patrick O’Farrell’s laboratory as a Human Frontier postdoctoral fellow at the University of California San Francisco to explore mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) transmission in Drosophila. In 2017, she started her group as Wellcome Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the Gurdon Institute to continue her work in heteroplasmy transmission. She also obtained an ERC Starting Grant in 2018 to study mtDNA recombination.

Hansong is an expert in the field of mitochondrial genetics. Among her ground-breaking research advances, Hansong showed that deleterious mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations are selectively eliminated by purifying selection, but certain sequence polymorphisms can grant pathogenic mitochondrial genomes selfish transmission advantages so that they outcompete functional genomes and impair health. Moreover, Hansong has demonstrated that homologous recombination occurs in animal mitochondria and capitalised on this to develop the first system to isolate recombinant mtDNA, providing a means to genetically engineer animal mtDNA.