Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

Every living cell is like a microcosmos which autonomously functions according to the rules recorded in DNA. Understanding comprehensively how these functions work should be very helpful to improve human life and the ecological balance. With emerging biotechnology in high-throughput DNA and RNA sequencing, we have great chance to reveal secret mechanisms through analyzing large amounts of biological data. In this talk, I will use the various projects I have engaged in to illustrate how to apply appropriate computational tools or develop new methods that process large amounts of biological data for conducting hypothesis-driven experimentation and statistical tests. These projects cover basic scientific problems and biomedical issues, including novel human miRNAs identification, animal miRNA evolution, evolution of C4 plants, gene regulation of C4 leaf anatomy structure, and gene regulation of mouse cardiac hypertrophy.