In the early days of the wheat sequencing effort, Ming-Cheng Luo pioneered the development of high information content BAC fingerprinting (HICF) that enabled the IWGSC to develop the first chromosome-based physical maps. Along with Jan Dvorak, he has been a leader in the sequencing of the Ae. tauschii genome. Most recently, Ming-Cheng has pioneered the use of BioNano optical maps for improving the BAC-based sequencing of wheat.

Ming-Cheng Luo is Research Geneticist at the University of California, Davis, in the United States. His research interests range from plant genetics and plant genome evolution to plant structural genomics and bioinformatics. After his graduate studies at the Triticeae Research Institute of Sichuan Agricultural University in China where he studied the genetics of interspecific crossability in wheat, Ming-Cheng transferred to UC Davis in 1993 and joined a team constructing genetic maps of einkorn wheat. He studied factors influencing the distribution of recombination along wheat chromosomes and how the Ph1 locus regulates recombination between homoeologous chromosomes.

In recent years, his research has focused on physical mapping, genome evolution and development of genomic resources. Since 2000, he has been playing a leading role in several genome projects, including one aiming at producing a high quality draft of the genome of Ae tauschii – the progenitor of wheat D genome.