Affiliation: Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS) & Peking Union Medical College (PUMC), Department of Medicinal Plant Identification Center

Dr. Yimian Ma is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicinal Plant Identification Center in the Institute of Medicinal Plant Development (IMPLAD), Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS) & Peking Union Medical College (PUMC). Her doctoral thesis focused on rice functional-genomic research at Prof. Chengcai Chu’s laboratory, at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. After obtaining her PhD, she moved to the Institute of Medicinal Plant Development (IMPLAD), Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS) & Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) for her post-doctoral work. She first joined Prof. Shilin Chen’s group to study the chloroplast genomes for medicinal plants and establish the chloroplast genome extraction method. Thereafter, she joined Prof. Shanfa Lu’s lab, where she identified forty terpenoid biosynthesis-related genes from Salvia miltiorrhiza Bge, of which twenty-seven are novel. After that, she began her tenure as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicinal Plant Cultivation Center, two years after which she was promoted as an Associate Professor. Her work is mainly focused on the biosynthesis pathways of secondary metabolites of medicinal plants and she is skilled in revealing these pathways using metabolic, transcriptomic, and genomic methods. As depicted in recent works, her group has revealed tissue‑specific flavonoid compositions and their biosynthesis pathways in Ziziphora bungeana by using integrated metabolomic and transcriptomic profiling methods.