Overview
Cao studies life at the systems level, systems biology, both computationally and experimentally: what cellular life is and how it holistically and dynamically responds to internal and external perturbations through the exchange of mass and energy with its environment.
He advises the Global Health and iMEP master’s programs at DKU and serves as an adjunct PhD adviser at Westlake University. Highly motivated undergraduate and graduate students from biology, math/data science, computer science, and chemistry are welcome to join his research group.
His research is anchored in a perspective on life adapted from NASA’s definition:
"Life is a fully autonomous self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution."
Building on this foundation, I have developed the BEL framework: BEL: Biology = Environment × Life.
This framework reimagines life as an automatic, self-sustaining, and responsive system—a physical structure operating by chemical laws and regulated by biological rules. This interdisciplinary nature underscores the importance of a strong foundation in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and coding for anyone venturing into life sciences, and therefore is also the platform their synergistic combination and integration. This what makes life science hard—and incredibly exciting!
The Cao Lab is dedicated to developing innovative theories on BEL at the systems level. His team integrates computational and experimental approaches to study how life, as a structured and regulated framework, dynamically responds to both internal and external perturbations. While the biological processes are driven by chemical reactions governed by the laws of thermodynamics, they are ultimately constrained by the fundamental principles of physics, including quantum mechanics.
His theoretical work involves modeling the holistic operation of cellular metabolism using metabolic model-based multi-omics integration, with a focus on genome-scale metabolic networks. A significant milestone in this endeavor is our highly cited publication in Nature Communications, which introduces a novel mathematical representation of metabolic networks and their regulation.
This integrated approach aims to uncover the underlying principles governing cellular life in varying environments, thereby bridging the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, and data science.
The Cao Lab now focuses on three areas of research:
- Brain cancer: understand glioblastoma heterogeneity and development mechanism, identify therapeutical targets, and develop treatments using multi single-cell omics and biological theories
- AI-based drug repurposing for emerging human pathogens
- Systems biology evolution of bacterial extremophiles under global warming
- Systems biology mechanism of cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms
Li, G., L. Liu, W. Du, H. Cao. Local flux coordination and global gene expression regulation in metabolic modeling. Nat Commun 14, 5700 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-41392-6