SOOJIN YI

Research Interests


I am interested in understanding the genetic basis of genome evolution. Here are some of the current projects in the lab.
(Click on titles for more information and recent publications.)

Determinants of Genome Evolution

I am broadly interested in questions on determinants of genome evolution. One of the most striking example of biological diversity is the fact that genomes of different species exhibit extreme diversity in 'genome phenotypes', such as genome size, nucleotide context, numbers of genes and functional elements, types and frequencies of specific transposable elements. Understanding how different genome phenotypes evolve and ultimately lead to the astonishing amount of biological diversity is one of my long-term goal. Here are some recent papers from the laboratory on the topic of genome size evolution (Yi and Streelman 2005, Yi 2006). We will continue continued interest in investigating evolution of genome phenotypes. In particular, I plan to incorporate my expertise in point mutations and genome evolution. I will analyze the effect of nucleotide context and body temperature in an immediate future.

Another aspect of genome evolution we have been investigating is the relationship between sequence and functional evolution. Evolutionary rates are commonly used as a measure of selective constraints. The underlying assumption for this practice is that functional constraints will be faithfully translated into sequence constraints. In addition, sequence data are more easily obtained than functional data. However, the direct relationship between functional evolution and evolutionary rates remains to be evaluated. Also, 'functional evolution' occurs in various levels (for example, expression levels, gene dispensability, location in protein interaction network, etc.), which represent different aspects of biology. Recently a plethora of functional data has become available for several model species. Utilizing such data, we seek to evaluate the relationship between evolutionary rates and evolution of functional variables. Here are some recent papers on this topic from our laboratory (Kim and Yi 2006, Kim and Yi 2007).

Yi, S. (2006). Non-adaptive evolution of genome complexity. BioEssays, 28: 979-982. [Abstract] [PDF]

Yi, S. and J. T. Streelman. (2005). Genome size is negatively correlated with effective population size in ray-finned fishes. Trends in Genetics, 21:643-646. [Abstract] [PDF]

Kim, S.-H., and Yi, S. (2006). Correlated asymmetry between sequence and functional divergence of duplicate proteins in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 23: 1068-1075. [Abstract] [PDF, Supplementary Material]

Kim, S-H. and Yi, S. (2007). Understanding relationship between sequence and functional evolution in yeast proteins. Genetica, 131: 151-156. [Abstract] [PDF]

To use the partial correlation method used in this paper, click this [link]