Guanqiao Feng, PhD
Computational Biologist | Machine Learning | Genomics | Gene Regulation

Females and males often exhibit different physical traits, but only a small number of genes differ between female and male genomes. Therefore, sexual dimorphism is mainly caused by differential regulation of genes shared by both sexes. Gene regulation involves multi-layer networks including transcriptional regulation, and post-transcriptional regulation such as alternative splicing(AS). Most published studies on gene regulation of plant sexual dimorphism have focused on transcriptional regulation. Around 60% genes in plant genomes are regulated by AS, but this factor has never been explored in as a component of sex-biased regulation. Moreover, AS is shown to be a key regulator in sex determination in fruit fly. I am very interested in investigating genes exhibit sex-biased AS and whether we can relate these patterns to what we observed in fruit fly.