Source: China Science Daily 2013-04-09 Page 06
Written by: Shen Chunlei
Translated by: Zhang Saijia
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

On April 11, Professor He Xionglei from Sun Yat-sen University will give a lecture entitled “The Expression Output of a Single X Chromosome” at the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

He Xionglei and his collaborators have studied the functional differentiation of duplicate genes by using the data from functional genomics and proposed a subneofunctionalization model of gene duplication. They have also explained the relationship between the duplicability of genes and the complexity of genes, and pointed out that gene duplication can increase both the number of genes and the complexity of genes. Moreover, they have discovered the important phenomenon that genes with insignificant functions are inclined to duplicate.

He proposed the concept of lethal link in protein networks to explain the famous centrality-lethality phenomenon. Recently, he used the RNA-Seq data to refute the Ohno’s hypothesis which argued that the expression level of X chromosome was doubled during evolution, and proposed a new perspective on X chromosome evolution.