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Welcome to Xian Chen’s laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We are part of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine, and Lineberger NCI Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Chen is also the Faculty Director for Quantitative Proteomics Center for Disease Markers and a member of Lineberger NCI Comprehensive Cancer Center and Programs in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology.

Without the need of a pre-convinced notion or hypothesis, emerging systems biology approaches proteomics in particular, provide a unique opportunity to resolve the complexity of the operation of biological systems including those phenotype-specific changes in protein expression, post-translational modifications, and protein-protein interactions. Our research group has been focusing on developing and applying cutting-edge technologies of proteomics to investigate systematically the molecular pathways/mechanisms of real-time pathogenesis of various human diseases such as immune disorders, inflammation-associated cancers, etc. In general, our systems investigation is discovery-driven and can generate multiple biological hypotheses which allows for the dissection of dynamic functional networks involving multiple proteins and their temporal changes in expression and modifications. To achieve these goals with different biological systems we take full advantage of the unique strength of state-of-art mass spectrometry at the Proteomics Pathways Discovery Core for the upstream non-biased screening for the target discovery which is followed by biological characterization using a variety of molecular/cellular biology approaches.

News and Events

Student Thesis defense: Adil Muneer (Xian Chen lab)
August 28, 2023, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm in Marsico 2004 at UNC.

Xian Chen PhD featured on The Proteomics Show podcast “Road to Chicago” series (Dec. 2022)

For current news visit Biochemistry and Biophysics website news: Xian Chen

News 2013 and prior:

UNC researchers discover the underlying mechanisms behind chronic inflammation-associated diseases

ENCODE scientist show how DNA blueprint functions

UNC team reports a novel DNA Damage-Dependent Tumor Suppressor

NCI’s Proteome Characterization Centers Announced

CPTAC Proteome Characterization Center Principal Investigators

National Cancer Institute-funded center to study proteins for better cancer diagnosis, treatment

GO accelerator for genome research

UNC scientists win $1.6 million stimulus award to accelerate decoding of human genome