热点大瓜

Bioinformatics and computational biology support include the development of customized tools and approaches to support faculty led research and advanced data analysis and mining for research projects and funding application, those include:

• Gene regulation: including functional promoter, transcriptional regulatory network, and miRNA analyses.
• RNA-Seq, Chip-seq, Chip-RNA, ChiP-chip, Affymetrix GeneChip, and cDNA microRNA data analyses.
• Genome scale sequence analysis: ESTs, genomes, etc.
• Biological data analysis and mining using statistical approaches.
• Pathway analyses, Protein and metabolic profiling.
• Development of bioinformatics tools for the above analyses.

I am currently pursuing a variety of computational and genomics topics and collaborating with colleagues on large-scale genomics projects, including developing statistical and computational approaches for gene expression, transcriptional regulatory network, and large-scale sequence analyses. My independent research interest is on the global gene regulation at both transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels. The major focus is to use computational approaches to integrate high-throughput biological data to ask questions and understand gene regulation mechanisms in a systems level. These include:

Transcriptional Regulation of Gene expression. Regulation of gene expression plays a key role in many cellular processes, including proliferation, senescence and development. Transcription is a major target for regulation of gene expression in all organisms, and failure to correctly regulate transcription is a cause of many diseases, notably cancer. Indeed, many human oncogenes are themselves transcriptional regulators. Transcriptional regulation also plays a key role in the virulence of many human pathogens. Therefore it is vital to understand the mechanisms by which transcription is regulated. My research is focused on the mechanisms of transcriptional regulation of disease-related gene expression;My research also includes conducting genome-wide studies of regulatory elements to elucidate the regulatory logic of transcription factors and their corresponding binding sites in controlling gene expression and applying the developed statistical and computational approaches from the above research to collaborative projects.

Post-transcriptional Gene Regulation by microRNAs. microRNAs will shape biology and change the traditional concepts of the molecular biology. My research focus is to uncover the widespread influence of miRNAs on disease-related gene expression.

Genetic Variation and Diseases.  Genetic variations play important roles in the regulation of gene expression such as miRNA and SNPs.  We are interested in addressing the questions as how different miRNAs and SNPs might contribute separately or synergistically to specific phenotypes such as diseases.