Living organisms constantly incorporate information/signals from surroundings in their survival strategies and to maximize reproductive success. My long-term interest is to understand how plants integrate environmental cues, including biotic and abiotic stresses, into the regulation of growth and development. One step toward this understanding is to answer the question: how do plants adjust growth and development to environmental changes via regulations of pre-mRNA splicing?

Pre-mRNA splicing is a necessary regulatory step in all eukaryotic cells. Using next generation sequencing (NGS), scientists have discovered an increasing number of splicing events that have not been documented before even in well-studied species. So far, my lab has found evidence that a splicing factor, SR45, is involved in plant growth and development and responds to cold/heat stress and sugar supplies (Plant Physiol, 2009). Our work has shown that a single phosphorylation event on SR45 protein is directly affecting SR45 functions in a tissue specific manner (Plant Signaling & Behavior, 2014). In addition, we also identified new associations between SR45 and 7 proteins, including U5 snRNP components and SR proteins, using co-immunoprecipitation (Plant Signaling & Behavior, 2014). In collaboration with a computer scientist, Dr. Padmini Srinivasan, from University of Iowa and biologists in University of Maryland, we developed and field tested a literature scanning system for biologists: FERRET (BMC BIOINFORMATICS, 2015). This paper has been accessed more than 4000 times in the first month of publication.

I am planning to extend the work above with the following three goals:

With the rapid development in NGS and proteomics, we attempt to answer the question how many of the SR45-regulated splicing events are biologically important at the protein level (Frontiers in Plant Science, 2019). This question has led us to new findings that SR45 may act as a suppressor for plant innate immunity to pathogens (BMC Genomics, 2017). Now a new high-resolution single-molecule sequencing-based Arabidopsis transcriptome offers a more reliable reference for NGS read mapping (Genome Biology, 2022). All of the above will help shed light on the emerging roles of SR45 in splicing, gene silencing, abiotic stress response and others that yet to be revealed. 

My research has been supported by several research awards from the National Science Foundation:

Undergraduate students who are interested in training opportunities in molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry and/or bioinformatics are welcome to contact me for potential research experience.

Here is a list of publications from our research.