Postdoctoral Associate, Yale School of Medicine
Email: kun.xiong@yale.edu
Office/Lab:
When I worked to get my master’s degree in China, I was doing regular bench work on cancer, but then gradually I became interested in systems biology after some reading. At that time, results from computational simulations of signaling networks and from other theoretical studies were novel and fascinating to me, because they provided a different explanation to biological activities. To me, activities inside cells are no longer molecules and interactions that are represented by bands and fluorescence. Precise descriptions based on well-formed mathematic and physical formulas are also possible. I hope to transfer results of theoretical researches into applicable guidelines of more detailed studies, like cancer research.
I am currently working on a model describing the formation of transcription factor network. We hope to develop a toy model that can be used as a null hypothesis on the effect of neutral mutation and selection on the evolution of transcription factor network. Another ongoing project is on molecular error and evolvability, which is based on a published model (Rajon and Masel, 2001) of stop codon read-through and the evolvability of population.
Publications:
- Xiong K., Lancaster A. K., Siegal M. L., & Masel J. (2018) Adaptive evolution of feed-forward loops versus diamonds to filter out short spurious signals, manuscript submitted.
- Xiong K, McEntee J, Porfirio D, Masel J. (2017) Drift barriers to quality control when genes are expressed at different levels, Genetics 205: 397-407.