Xiangfeng Wang
Current Position: Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Yale University; Research Fellow, Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Harvard University, School of Public Health
Education: Ph.D. in Bioinformatics (2007), Peking University; B.S. in Biology (2002), China Agricultural University
Non-scientific Interests: Traveling, cooking, swimming and playing video games
When I was in high school and college, I was so addicted to computer games that I used every possible minute to sit in front of the monitor. Fortunately, my college life ended up with merging my career and hobby to Bioinformatics. In graduate school, I was co-mentored by Prof. Songgang Li (Bioinformatics advisor) and Prof. Xing-Wang Deng (Molecular Biology advisor). My project was to profile transcription in the rice genome using the now almost “ancient” tiling microarray technology. In that project, we discovered lots of aberrant transcription coming from both strands and corresponding with non-coding RNAs. We believed there must be some unknown regulatory mechanism linking the small RNAs and cryptic transcription, but we could not fully solve the puzzle at that time. I am now also working in Prof. Shirley Liu’s laboratory at Harvard, where I use computational methods to work on plant RNA/ChIP-Seq data generated by Prof. Deng’s laboratory at Yale. We analyzed this highly integrated data set to understand how small RNAs are involved in epigenetic regulation and in transcriptional gene silencing mechanisms from a genomic perspective.
Current Position: Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Yale University
Education: Ph.D. in Genetics (2006), Department of Plant Pathology, Iowa State University; B.Sc. in Crop Production Sciences (2001), University of Kiel, Germany
Non-scientific Interests: Birding, reading
I wanted to become a plant biologist as long as I can remember. When I was seven or so, I got a children’s spade and sunflower seeds for my birthday, which I promptly put to use in our yard. No surprise then that I majored in Crop Production Sciences in college. I did my doctoral work in Prof. Thomas Baum’s laboratory in the Department of Plant Pathology at Iowa State University, where I worked on molecular plant-nematode interactions. During that time, I discovered my interest in plant genome biology. I was fortunate to be given the opportunity to use cutting edge sequencing technologies to explore the maize epigenome and transcriptome as a postdoc in Prof. Deng’s laboratory at Yale University. Working with the maize epigenome has been very exciting. We have learned a lot about the epigenetic makeup of maize from this project, but we are still far away from understanding the detailed mechanisms by which epigenetic modifications regulate the enormously complex maize genome.
Xueyong Li
Current Position: Assistant Investigator, Chinese Academy of Agriculture Sciences
Education: Ph.D. in Genetics (2002), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing; M.S. in Molecular Biology (1998), Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences; BA in Crop Sciences (1994), Laiyang Agriculture College, Shandong Province, China
Non-scientific Interests: Being a father
Growing up in an agricultural area, I developed an interest in crop genetics early on. For both my Master’s and doctoral degrees I worked with crop plants. For my Ph.D., which I did with Prof. Jiayang Li at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, I characterized the MOC1 gene in rice, which is involved in tillering, an important agronomical trait. After graduating in China, I had the opportunity to join Prof. Xing-Wang Deng’s crop research team involving both Yale University and National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing. I continued working with the two important crops, rice and maize. Initially I studied histone modifications in rice and then expanded into epigenetics, small RNAs and mRNA profiling in maize, which led to the current Plant Cell paper. This was an exciting project, not only because the first draft of the maize genome sequence has just been released, but also because histone modifications, small RNAs and genome regulation seem to be interrelated in unexpected ways.