Iowa State University
Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology
1210 Molecular Biology Building
Ames, Iowa 50011-3260
Phone: 515-294-7322
Fax: 515-294-6755
Email:
Xun Gu
Professor
Dr. Gu, Professor, received this B.Sc. in Genetics and M.Sc. in Genetics from Fudan University, China, in 1985 and 1987, respectively. After receiving his Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Texas, Houston, Dr. Gu worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics, Penn State University. He came to Iowa State University as an Assistant Professor in 1998, and was promoted to Associate Professor (with tenure) in 2002, and to Full Professor (with tenure) in 2006. In addition, he is presently an Adjunct Professor in Fudan University. Dr. Gu serves on the editorial board of “Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution”, and “Genetica”, and “Journal of Experimental Zoology B”. Dr. Gu is the 2001 recipient of the prestigious Dupont Young Professor Award. Dr, Gu’s research group has focused on comparative and evolutionary genomics, bioinformatics and computational biology, and evolution of systems biology. Dr. Gu and his group have published over 80 papers.
Research Description
My research has been focused on (1) statistical methods for evolutionary genomics, and (2) high throughput comparative genomics analysis. Achievements of our research group are: Develop statistical methods and bioinformatics software (DIVERGE) for predicting functional divergence of a protein family, develop statistical framework for expression divergence after gene duplication, propose the tissue-driven hypothesis for expression divergence between species, demonstrate the emergence of human proteome by gene/genome duplications, show rapid expression shifts in the human brain after the spit of chimpanze, statistical modeling for gene gain, and loss during genomic evolution and comparative genomic analysis in plant genomics. Recently, our research is exploring the new area of Systems Biology and Evolution: Understanding gene pleiotrophy, genome complexity and comparative analysis of gene networks (gene-interaction, metabolic and signaling networks), and gene networking modeling and evolution.
Su Z, Wang J, Yu J, Huang X and Gu X. 2006. Evolution of Alternative Splicing after Gene Duplications.. Genome Research 16:182-189.
Gu, X. 2006. A Simple Statistical Method for Estimating Type-II (Cluster-Specific) Functional Divergence of Protein Sequences.. Molecular Biology and Evolution 23:1937-1945.
Gu, X, Zhang Z, and Wei Huang. 2005. Rapid evolution of expression and regulatory network after yeast gene/genome duplications.. PNAS 102:707-712.
Gu, X, Huang, W, Xu, D, Zhang H. 2005. GeneContent: Software for Whole-Genome Phylogenetic Analysis.. Bioinformatics 21:1713-1714..
Gu, X. 2004. Statistical framework for phylogenetic analysis of expression profiles. Genetics 167: 531-542.
Gu, J, Gu, X. 2003. Induced gene expression in human brain after the split from chimpanzee. Trend in Genetics 19:63-65.
Gu, X, Wang Y, Gu, J. 2002. Age-distribution of human gene families showing equal roles of large and small-scale duplications in vertebrate evolution.. Nature Genetics 31:205-209.
