Educational experience：

BSc: Microbiology and Biochemistry, Hebei University, 1993 Msc: Cell Biology, Lanzhou University, 1996 PhD: Botany, Wuhan University, 1999

Statement：

I am interested in every aspects of molecular and genome evolution, especially the adaptive and passive responses of genomes and proteomes to environmental changes, like oxygen concentration, water content, and temperature shift. The routine work in my lab is to test the long-debating hypotheses in molecular and genome evolution and my own ideas arising from reading literatures by bioinformatic analysis of various publicly available –omics data. The present topics we are working on include, but are not limited within: 1. Endosymbiont DNA transfer (Transfer of DNA or gene sequences among mitochondria, plastids, and nucleus). 2. Proteomic and genomic changes associated with oxygen requirement. 3. Expansion and contraction of gene families, repeats, introns, and genome size.

Selected Publication：

1. Ma MY, Lan XR, Niu DK (2016). Intron gain by tandem genomic duplication: a novel case in a potato gene encoding RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. PeerJ, 4, e2272.

2. Ma MY, Che XR, Porceddu A and Niu DK (2015). Evaluation of the mechanisms of intron loss and gain in the social amoebae Dictyostelium. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 15, 286.

3. Yang YF, Zhu T and Niu DK (2013). Association of intron loss with high mutation rate in Arabidopsis: Implications for genome size evolution. Genome Biology and Evolution, 5, 723-733. Recommended by F1000 Victor Norris and John Herrick.

4. Zhu T and Niu DK (2013). Frequency of intron loss correlates with processed pseudogene abundance: a novel strategy to test the reverse transcriptase model of intron loss. BMC Biology, 11, 23.

5. Niu DK and Jiang L (2013). Can ENCODE tell us how much junk DNA we carry in our genome? Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, 430, 1340-1343.

6. Hou WR, Li M and Niu DK (2011). Counting citations in texts rather than reference lists to improve the accuracy of assessing scientific contribution. BioEssays, 33, 724-727. Highlighted by BioEssays: Making a deeper impact: How to measure your actual scientific footprint?

7. Huang YF and Niu DK (2008). Evidence against the energetic cost hypothesis for the short introns in highly expressed genes. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 8, 154.

8. Li SW, Feng L and Niu DK (2007). Selection for the miniaturization of highly expressed genes. Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, 360, 586-592.

9. Niu DK (2007). Protecting exons from deleterious R-loops: a potential advantage of having introns. Biology Direct, 2, 11.

10. Niu DK, Hou WR and Li SW (2005). mRNA-mediated intron losses: Evidence from extraordinarily large exons. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 22, 1475-1481.