About

Runtian Wu

PhD student · Molecular Biology · University of California, Los Angeles

I study how plants remember — and what their memories are made of.

At the Jacobsen lab, I work with a small weed called Arabidopsis thaliana — a plant with no flowers worth photographing and no fruit worth eating, but with an outsized talent for one thing: chemically annotating its own genome. My research asks how those chemical annotations — methyl groups placed silently along the DNA — are written, maintained, inherited, and occasionally erased.

To answer it, I move between worlds: growing plants under strict light schedules, mass spectrometers weighing proteins they barely notice, sequencers reading methylation letter by letter, and code that turns terabytes of reads into a sentence of biology. I like the seam between bench and computer most — where a wet-lab observation becomes a hypothesis you can test overnight.

Off the clock

I write poetry — mostly about plants, distance, and the strange grammar of being a scientist far from home.

Los Angeles, California