The Environmental and Plant Biology Colloquium series presents Dr. Zhihua Hua on Decoding Hundreds of F-box Genes in Plants: from Omics Data to Molecular Mechanisms on Friday, Jan. 31, at 11:50 a.m. in Porter Hall 104.
Dr. Zhihua Hua
Hua is Assistant Scientist and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Laboratory of Genetics, School of Medicine and Public Health, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Morgan Vis is host.
Abstract: The rapidly increasing accumulation of omics data and new sequencing technologies have made it possible to systematically study an organism at an omics-wide level. During the past decade, functional studies and proteome-wide analyses have demonstrated that the ubiquitin-26S proteasome system (UPS) impacts all aspects of a plant’s life. Given the depth and breadth of UPS members and UPS substrates, which constitute >12% of the proteome in Arabidopsis thaliana, the UPS has been recognized as one of the richest genomic resources to target for improving crop production. In my research, I have used its largest family, the F-box gene superfamily, as a model system to develop an integrative omics study. Using numerous bioinformatic and statistical approaches, I have successfully integrated information from 18 plant species genomes, 432 individual Arabidopsis genomes, more than 5,000 Arabidopsis transcriptomes, and 4 epigenomes, to discover a genomic-drift evolutionary mechanism of the plant F-box gene superfamily, to which epigenomic programming has also significantly contributed, suggesting a co-evolution between genomes and epigenomes. Through these independent research studies, I have established three new future research directions, including 1) the long-awaited understanding of epigenome evolution and its influence on superfamily evolution; 2) proteomics-centered integrative omics studies of ubiquitylation and F-box proteins; 3) high-throughput functional genomic studies of essential F-box genes. My ultimate research goal is to create novel approaches for improving crop production.
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