Prof. Zeng received his Ph.D. from SUNY at Albany in 2008 and had his postdoc training at MIT from 2008 to 2012. In 2012, he joined the Devision of Life Science at HKUST as an assistant professor. In 2019, Prof. Zeng was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Ocean Science at HKUST.

Research Question

We are interested in the role of bacteria and their viruses (bacteriophages) in marine ecological processes and the molecular mechanism of their adaptation to the environment. We are using phages that infect the unicellular cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus as a model system. This cyanobacterium is the smallest but the most abundant photosynthetic organism on Earth and it is the dominant primary producer in the oceans. Our ultimate goal is to understand marine ecosystem functioning from the molecular level.

Representative Publications

1. Liu, R., Liu, Y., Chen, Y., Zhan, Y., Zeng, Q. 2019. Cyanobacterial viruses exhibit diurnal rhythms during infection. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 116(28): 14077-14082.
2. Fang, X., Liu, Y., Zhao, Y., Chen, Y., Liu, R., Qin, Q.-L., Li, G., Zhang, Y.-Z., Chan, W., Hess, W., Zeng, Q. 2019. Transcriptomic responses of the marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus to viral lysis products. Environmental Microbiology 21(6): 2015-2028.
3. Liu*, R., Liu*, Y., Liu, S., Wang, Y., Li, K., Li, N., Xu, D., and Zeng, Q. 2017. Three-dimensional superresolution imaging of the FtsZ ring during cell division of the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus. mBio 8: e00657-17. (*authors contributed equally) (recommended by F1000 https://f1000.com/prime/732146604#)
4. Ni, T., Zeng, Q. 2016. Diel infection of cyanobacteria by cyanophages. Frontiers in Marine Science 2: 123.
5. Lin, X., Ding, H., Zeng, Q. 2016. Transcriptomic response during phage infection of a marine cyanobacterium under phosphorus-limited conditions. Environmental Microbiology 18(2): 450-460.