Recognizing Plant Cell first authors: Jianbo Xie

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Jianbo Xie, first author of Evolutionary origins of pseudogenes and their association with regulatory sequences in plants

Current Position: Associate professor of College of Biological Sciences and Technology, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China

Educations: 2010-2015, Ph. D. College of Biological Sciences, China Agricultural University

Non-scientific Interests: Billiards and traveling

Brief bio: During my Ph. D. studies at the College of Biological Sciences, China Agricultural University, my major was microbiology and I was trained bioinformatics in Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academic of Sciences. After graduation, I joined the research group of Deqiang Zhang. Now my research focuses on genomics, evolution and plant-environment interactions. I realized that the plant science is really a good field with many opportunities and challenges. During the past years, I was focused on the origin, evolution and function of noncoding RNAs as well as poplar’s responses against plant pathogens.

Previous studies reported some long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) and microRNAs (miRNAs) were highly associated with pseudogenes. In this project, we developed a computational pipeline (PlantPseudo) that can search a plant genome and identify pseudogenes in the genome. We used this pipeline to clarify the relationships between pseudogenes and genes/lncRNAs/miRNAs on a genome-wide scale. Finally, we found that a surprisingly large fraction of lncRNAs/miRNAs originated from the transcription of putative psuedogene proximal upstream regions. We therefore propose that rapid rewiring of pseudogene transcriptional regulatory regions is a major mechanism driving the origin of novel regulatory modules.

I hope to continue studying plant science on plant-environment interactions in the future.

 

谢剑波, 第一作者 Evolutionary origins of pseudogenes and their association with regulatory sequences in plants

目前职位: 生物科学与技术学院, 北京林业大学, 副教授

教育经历: 2010-2015 中国农业大学, 直博生

兴趣爱好: 打台球、旅游

本人简介: 博士期间我的专业是微生物学，在这期间在中国科学院基因组研究所学习了生物信息学分析相关技术。毕业后，我加入张德强教授团队开展基因组学、进化和植物-环境互作研究。我认为植物科学是一个非常不错的研究的领域，有着很多的机遇和挑战。在过去几年里，我主要对非编码RNA的起源、进化和功能，还有杨树对植物病原菌的响应进行研究。

之前有研究报道lncRNAs/miRNAs和假基因有密切的关系。在这个课题里，我开发了一套在植物基因组中鉴定假基因的流程。使用这个流程去研究假基因与基因、非编码RNAs之间的关系。最终，发现大量的lncRNAs/miRNAs起源于假基因的上游启动子区域。因此，研究认为假基因调控区域的快速重排和进化可以促进新的调控系统的构建。

我希望在将来继续从事植物-环境的互作研究。