Wei Yang (biologist)

Wei Yang (Chinese: 杨薇; pinyin: Yáng Wēi; born 1963) is a Chinese-American structural biologist.

[4] Since 1995 she has been a senior scientist in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the National Institutes of Health.

Her research mainly focuses on DNA mismatch repair, translesion synthesis, and V(D)J recombination.

[2][4] Her lab discovered that DNA synthesis and RNA degradation reactions are propelled by cation trafficking and require transiently bound Mg²⁺ and K⁺ ions that are absent in the static structures of substrate- or product-enzyme complexes.

[4] In 2011, the Protein Society honored Yang with the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award.