Chuanqing Li is a PhD student at the University of Queensland’s Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation and the ARC Training Centre for Predictive Breeding, supervised by Dr Mehrnush Forutan. His project focuses on low-cost genotyping with ultra-low fold sequencing for tropical cattle, combining Oxford Nanopore Technologies data with imputation to recover high-quality single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and explore structural variants (SVs). Routine high-density genotyping can be cost-prohibitive for large tropical herds; ultra-low-coverage sequencing plus imputation aims to deliver similar information at far lower cost. The goal is to integrate SNPs and SVs into genomic prediction to improve breeding values for traits critical in the tropics—such as fertility, heat tolerance, tick resistance, and meat quality—while keeping costs accessible for industry.
Before his doctorate, Chuanqing earned an M.S. in Animal Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction at Northwest A&F University. He has experience in cattle whole-genome sequencing, genome-wide association studies, and multi-omics analyses including Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing and chromosome conformation capture.
Beyond his PhD, Chuanqing enjoys working out at the gym and staying active outdoors.
