Recently, Professor Philipp Kapranov's team from Institute of Genomics under the School of Medicine of Huaqiao University (HQU) has discovered a recently evolved class of ribozyme -- hovlinc ribozyme in human genome. This is the first time that natural ribozyme is found in human extra-long intergenic noncoding RNA (vlincRNA). The result was published online in Nature Chemical Biology on 22th March 2021 under the title "Hovlinc is a recently evolved class of ribozyme found in human lncRNA". Professors Claire C. Chen and Andrej Lupták from University of California, Irvine (UCI) published an article to discuss and comment on the research in the "News & Views" section of the journal.

Yue Chen, a PhD student from the Institute of Genomics of HQU is the first author of the paper, with Dr. Fei Qi as co-first and co-corresponding author and Professor Philipp Kapranov as corresponding author. HQU PhD student Fan Gao, HQU teachers Dr. Huifen Cao and Dr. Dongyang Xu, and Professor Kourosh Salehi-Ashtiani from New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) also participated in this research and co-authored the paper.