Through information contained in the mitochondrial genome, Prof. Ya-Ping Zhang and colleagues have systematically studied the origin and evolutionary history of modern Asian people. To achieve this, they first reconstructed the mitochondrial DNA phylogeny of East Asian and South Asian populations based on complete mitochondrial genome sequences. They then applied this phylogenetic information to studies of human evolution and mitochondrial diseases. Their research has been successfully published in several highly regarded journals in the field, e.g. Science, Am J Hum Genet, PNAS, Hum Mol Genet and Mol Biol Evol, which have been cited more than 1,000 times. Significantly, the project ‘Mitochondrial Genome Diversity and Population History of East Asian’, which involved only part of the works mentioned above, won the National Natural Science Prizes of China (Second Grade) in 2006.