- Principles of protein evolution
- Dynamics of mammalian genome
- Evolution of gene expression
- Genetic basis of phenotypic changes
- System biology
 Research
Activities
The main goal of Dr. Liao's research is to understand the general rules behind the causes and consequences of genome dynamics. Regarding the causes, he asks how and why certain types of genetic modifications or genomic features can emerge during the evolution. As for the consequences, he focuses on the phenotypic consequences resulting from such genomic changes. Due to insufficiency of critical “-omic” datasets, previously studies on these issues were mainly centered on individual genes, and the genome-wide patterns were hard to be assessed. In this post-genomic era, genomes, transcriptomes and interactomes of many organisms under various conditions were generated and have become publicly available. Through genome-wide identification of the footprints of natural selection, Dr. Liao's research aims to help us to gain a better understanding for the genetic basis of phenotypic variations between and within species.
Dr. Liao's present projects specify on five main questions that have puzzled biologists for years. First, what determines the evolutionary rate of genes and genomes? Second, what factors shape the genome architecture? Third, how have regulations of gene activity been achieved and modified? Fourth, how does genetic robustness of a biological system originate and evolve? Fifth, how similar are model organisms and humans at the system level? Bioinformatic approaches are used to address these long-standing mysteries.
Publications
Ben-Yang Liao and Jianzhi Zhang. 2008. Co-expression of linked genes in mammalian genomes is generally disadvantageous. Mol. Biol. Evol. 25: 1555-1565.
Ben-Yang Liao and Jianzhi Zhang. 2008. Null mutations in human and mouse orthologs frequently result in different phenotypes. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105: 6987-6992.
Meng-Shin Shiao, Ben-Yang Liao, Manyuan Long and Hon-Tsen Yu. 2008. Adaptive evolution of the insulin two-gene system in mouse. Genetics 178: 1683-1691.
Ben-Yang Liao and Jianzhi Zhang. 2007. Mouse duplicate genes are as essential as singleton genes. Trends Genet. 23: 378-381.
Ben-Yang Liao, Nicole M. Scott and Jianzhi Zhang. 2006. Impacts of gene essentiality, expression pattern, and gene compactness on the evolutionary rate of mammalian proteins. Mol. Biol. Evol. 23: 2072-2080.
Ben-Yang Liao and Jianzhi Zhang. 2006. Low rates of expression-profile divergence in highly-expressed genes and tissue-specific genes during mammalian evolution. Mol. Biol. Evol. 23: 1119-1128.
Ben-Yang Liao and Jianzhi Zhang. 2006. Evolutionary conservation of expression profiles between human and mouse orthologous genes. Mol. Biol. Evol. 23: 530-540.
Ben-Yang Liao, Yu-Jung Chang, Jan-Ming Ho and Ming-Jing Hwang. 2004. The UniMarker (UM) method for synteny mapping of large genomes. Bioinformatics 20: 3156-65.
2008/09/09
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