Grace Xiao

A major surprise resulted from the Human Genome Project was that humans, even though as an apparently much complex organism with 100 trillion cells, have only 25,000 to 30,000 genes. In contrast, the roundworm, an organism with 960 cells, has ~19,000 genes. It is now realized that the number of genes does not scale proportionally with biological sophistication. Instead, elaborate regulatory mechanisms mediate how, when and where a gene can be expressed, and such regulations are largely responsible for phenotype complexity in higher organisms. Dr. Grace Xiao's research interests are computational and systems biology of gene expression, and in particular post-/co-transcriptional gene regulation via multiple DNA, RNA sequence elements and RNA and protein regulators. The overall goal is to better understand how gene expression diversity and phenotypic robustness are achieved and regulated at the molecular level in health and disease. Her laboratory tackles these problems by developing and applying approaches in bioinformatics, comparative genomics, molecular biology and genetics, high-throughput biology, and systems modeling.

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