September 27th, 2021

Time for another update.
1) We published four papers this year so far. i) Riccardo's paper on structural landscape of viruses (a singular detour to virus land) was published in BMC Genomics. ii) Irene's comparative transcriptomic analysis of land plants was accepted in Nature Plants. iii) William's pipeline allowing construction of expression atlases for kingdoms of life landed in Bioinformatics. iv) Devendra's paper on removing auto-activators from yeast-two-hybrid assays found home in Scientific Reports.

2) Funding-wise, we managed to pull in three grants (out of six submitted proposals). We will (i) do a comparative study of stress responses in the plant kingdom, (ii) study how local crops modify their metabolism and transcriptome to stresses and different growth conditions and (iii) identify biosynthetic pathways of specialized metabolites in medicinal plants. Exciting times ahead!

3) We are joined by: i) Wee Han Poh (research fellow, joint appointment with Assoc. Prof. Scott Rice's lab), who will work on discovering the mode of action of antibacterial metabolites, ii) Syahirah Nur (project officer), who will work together with Wee Han, iii) Muhammad Zahin Bin Mohd Ali (Zahin Ali, project officer) , who will study gene expression in non-flowering plants and iv) Rajesh Gazara (research fellow), who will work on the local crops project (see above), v) Jong Ching ​Goh (project officer), who will work with Rajesh and vi) Peng Ken Lim (project officer), who is working on single cell transcriptomics and vii) Xinghai Zheng, who is working on omics analysis of heat stress acclimation in Brachypodium. We hope that COVID19 restrictions are lifted soon, as Rajesh is now waiting several months to join.

4) Riccardo left the group to pursue his passion on structural biology of viruses, while William finished his internship after publishing in Bioinformatics. Good luck guys!

5) Irene's publication was covered by internal NTU news. Check the article out here: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/science/2021/09/08/plant-organs-evolve-by-reusing-old-genes/ . We also started a new tradition in the lab: publication mugs. Join us and get yours (eventually)!

6) We are looking for a project officer to work on the comparative stress responses in plants. Check out the openings section for more info!

7) Despite the COVID19 annoyance, we had a good time running BS1009, Introduction to Computational Thinking. The 289 students were taught Python and as their final project, they analyzed RNA sequencing data for protists. What worked really well this year was having the student and instructors join WhatsApp groups, allowing the students to ask questions and receive answers within minutes. Thanks to the great instructors (most who are BS1009 alumni from 2019/2020), who answered questions 24/7. 

8) Like last year, we run a two month long internship, where BS1009 alumni analyzed gene expression data. This year, ~40 students were split into two groups. One group analyzed gene expression of bacteria to make bacteria.guru, while the other group downloaded and processed gene expression data to make protist.guru. you can find the preprints here and here, respectively.  

9) Peng Ken Lim received a PhD scholarship and will join us as a PhD student in Jan 2022.  Great job!