HC Lee is a Ministry of Education National Chair Professor and University Chair Professor of Biophysics at the National Central University. He was educated at the National Taiwan University (BSc) and McGill University (PhD). He worked at the Canadian Chalk River Research Laboratories as a theoretical physicist from 1968 to 1993, being a senior research officer and director of the Center for Mathematical Sciences during the later years. In 1993 he returned to Taiwan, first chairing the Physics Department of the National Chung Hsing University from 1993 to 1995 then moving to the Physics Department at the National Central University in 1995, where he is now professor. Prior to 1997 his research areas was quantum field theory and mathematical physics. In 1997 he turned to theoretical and computational biology and helped the then new National Center for Theoretical Sciences establish the ¡°Biology Inspired Theoretical Science¡± (BITS) program to promote cross-disciplinary research involving the natural and life sciences, and cross-strait collaboration in the field. Since 2006 he has been founding head of the Graduate Institute of Systems Biology and Bioinformatics at NCU. His Computational Biology Laboratory conducts cross-disciplinary research on genomics, neural science, and systems biology.

Tentative Title

Inverse symmetry in genomes and whole-genome inverse duplication

Abstract

Segmental duplication has long been known to be an important mechanism for genome growth and evolution (Lynch 2002, Bailey et al. 2002), and recently it has been firmly established that whole-genome duplications have at least occurred in yeast (Wolfe and Shields 1997; Wapinski et al. 2007) and in some species of fishes ray-finned fishes. Here we present evidence showing that whole-genome inverse duplication very likely occurred in one half of eubacterial genomes, and possibly in most chromosomes, prokaryotic as well as eukaryotic. We derive our evidence through a comprehensive study of the inverse symmetry in all publicly available complete genomes. We find that a vast majority of chromosomes have close to maximum global inverse symmetry, but the chromosomes exhibit starkly distinct patterns of local inverse symmetry. These patterns provide clues for a consistent narrative of the many ways inverse segmental duplications may have occurred in genomes.