Letian Xu

Letian Xu is an Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences, Hubei University, Wuhan, China. He received his undergraduate degree from Huazhong Agricultural University (2007-2011), and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. During Ph. D. training, he developed a keen focus on the diversified functions of insect gut bacteria. He continued the relative research as an Assistant Professor at Nankai University (2016-2017), Tianjin, China. Then, as a post-doctoral fellow (2017-2019) in Jiang Zhang’s lab at Hubei University, he studied the role of gut microbiota in RNAi of a leaf beetle. Dr. Xu was then recruited as faculty at Hubei University.

Microbial associations between insect pests and neighboring microbes are ubiquitous in nature and influence all aspects of the host’s physiology, ecology, and evolution. Accumulating studies suggest that a pair-wise or multi-trophic interaction of pests with their neighboring species contributes positively or negatively to insect pest outbreaks, which becomes increasingly complicated under climate change and human intervention. Dr. Xu is interested in the phenotypes of the multi-tropic interactions as well as the behind mechanisms with a special focus on diverse functions of the associated microbes. His overarching goals are (i) to elucidate the multi-tropic interaction phenotypes, (ii) to understand the diverse functions conferred by associated microbes, and (iii) to understand the molecular mechanisms about how specific changes in the microbiota composition that cause a phenotypic difference.