A long term goal of our lab is to characterize the fitness landscape and to understand the biological adaptation takes place there. A genotype space is the collection of all possible genotypes; it can be presented in the form of a genotype network in which two connected genotypes (nodes) are bridged by one mutation (edge). The fitness landscape embeds the fitness information in the genotype space. All organisms evolve in such landscape with fitness increases or unchanged each step. We will establish the genotype-phenotype map by high-throughput strategies on critical regulatory elements and study how it directs evolution. We also unveil the evolutionary trajectories by in vivo directed evolution.

The second goal of our lab is to trace cell lineages during development. We aim to unveil the pedigree of all somatic cells in a multicellular organism with an expedited mutation rate. By comparing species with different tissues or cell types, we study the developmental basis of such evolutionary innovation.

The current members of our group are from a variety of scientific background, having expertise in molecular biology, genomics, epigenomics, functional genomics, quantitative genetics, population genetics, computational biology, and/or systems biology. We join together as a team, to address important questions in genetics, evolution, and systems biology, by employing or developing computational or experimental technologies needed.