I've been fascinated by the miracle of life since a young age, and I have spent the last 20 years working on genomes of fish, fungi, and plants, including apple, pear, kiwifruit, blueberry, peach. Genome is a complete set of genetic sequences for the blueprint of life and influences every aspect of a living organism. It has features like transposons, non-coding RNAs, and protein-coding genes influencing the organism’s developments, traits, as well as responses to disease and environmental stimuli. Utilising the latest sequencing technologies and the power of high-performance computing resources, my work involves assembling fragmented pieces of genomes (‘reads’) into chromosomes, predicting genome features, identifying structure variations between genomes, profiling gene expressions in various tissue types under diverse conditions, and most interestingly, discovering associations from genomes and transcriptomes to agriculturally important traits like fruit colour, flavour, plant responses to biotic and abiotic stress.
To promote reproducible research and improve data analysis efficiency, my team and I also focuses on transforming complex computational analyses of genomes, transcriptomes, epigenomes, traits-association studies, and other operations, into user-friendly, deployable, and reusable pipelines.