This week marks Dr. Tsai’s birthday. Despite the fact that we are suffering from the pandemic, we are thrilled to be able to celebrate with our collaborator, Dr. Leu, and his lab members.

We take a one-day trip to 象山, Taipei, and enjoy a pleasant lunch at Nola Kitchen. At the end of the Chinese New Year, we thank all of

The season of festivities has come and we wish that all of us spend the best time with our family and friends. With Christmas, the new year is also around the corner and our wish for the upcoming year is that we can continue to grow in the same way and at the same pace.

Enhanced phenotypic diversity increases a population’s likelihood of surviving catastrophic conditions. Hsp90, an essential molecular chaperone and a central network hub in eukaryotes, has been observed to suppress or enhance the effects of genetic variation on phenotypic diversity in response to environmental cues. Because many Hsp90-interacting genes are involved in signaling transduction pathways and transcriptional regulation, we tested how common Hsp90-dependent differential gene expression is in natural populations. Many genes exhibited Hsp90-dependent strain-specific differential expression in five diverse yeast strains. We further identified transcription factors (TFs) potentially contributing to variable expression. We found that on Hsp90 inhibition or environmental stress, activities or abundances of Hsp90-dependent TFs varied among strains, resulting in differential strain-specific expression of their target genes, which consequently led to phenotypic diversity. We provide evidence that individual strains can readily display specific Hsp90-dependent gene expression, suggesting that the evolutionary impacts of Hsp90 are widespread in nature.

Background: Ubiquitous presence of short extrachromosomal circular DNAs (eccDNAs) in eukaryotic cells has perplexed generations of …

With the proliferation of genomic sequence data for biomedical research, the exploration of human genetic information by domain experts …