The Chinese Genomics Online Meet-up is a self-organized group of young Chinese researchers, mainly PhD students, postdocs and assistant professors, who meet online every two weeks to discuss plant genomics, evolution, statistics, bioinformatics, genetics and more.
I gave a research talk there, The Cause and Consequence of Alternative Splicing in Maize and Across Species, covering the first two chapters of my PhD dissertation.
The first part of the talk presents a genome-wide analysis of alternative splicing in maize, published as A Comprehensive Analysis of Alternative Splicing in Paleopolyploid Maize in Frontiers in Plant Science (2017).
The second part asks which alternative splicing events are evolutionarily conserved, and therefore likely under functional constraint, across monocots, focusing on five grass species: maize, sorghum, rice, foxtail millet and Brachypodium. Many alternative splicing variants are probably neutral; alongside classic mutant studies, our approach offers a way to identify potentially functional splicing events. This work was published as Evolutionarily Conserved Alternative Splicing Across Monocots in Genetics (2017), where it was the October 2017 cover article.
Both papers are listed as outputs of NSF Plant Genome Research Program award #1547787, for which this dissertation work provided the preliminary data.
Watch the talk below, or on YouTube.