top of page
Plant 3R-MYB evolution​
Plant 3R-MYB transcription factors are an important subgroup of the MYB super family in plants; however, their evolutionary history and functions remain poorly understood. We identified 225 3R-MYB proteins from 65 plant species, including algae and all major lineages of land plants.  Read More
Alternative splicing in response to jasmonate
Jasmonate is an essential phytohormone regulating plant growth, development and defense. The JAZ (Jasmonate ZIM-domain) repressors are key regulators that function in the first step of jasmonate signaling pathway. Alternative splicing (AS) plays an important regulatory role in JAZ function. It is not known whether other key genes were also regulated by alternative splicing in jasmonate pathway. In this project, we explored genes which undergo differential AS upon methyl jasmonate treatment using transcriptome and proteome approaches.   Read More
Plant TIFY evolution
The TIFY gene family is a plant specific gene family consists of four subfamiles: ZML, JAZ, PPD and TIFY. Most of the members contain multiple domains. In eukaryotes, More than 70% genes encode multi-domain proteins. Understanding the origin and evolution of the TIFY family would contribute to our knowledge of plant specific pathways these TIFYs are involved in, and also the evolution of multi-domain proteins in eukaryotes.    Read More
Alternative splicing in
sex dimorphism

Hou 2015

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.    Read More
bottom of page