RNA structure plays an important role in the post-transcriptional regulations of gene expression. The Ding group has been studying the functional roles of RNA structure in diverse biological processes such as mRNA processing (splicing and polyadenylation), translation and RNA degradation. The Ding group has also developed new methods to reveal the existence of tertiary RNA G-quadruplex structures in eukaryotes and uncovered that RNA G-quadruplex structure serves as a molecular marker to facilitate plant adaptation to the cold during evolution. Recently, the Ding group has developed the single-molecule RNA structure profiling method and revealed the functional importance of RNA structure in long noncoding RNAs.