Wen Lab

This is the Dr. Jean Wen’s Lab at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at The Australian National University.

We are a new computational biology lab of RNA and functional genomics at the Department of Genome Sciences, The John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR), ANU.

Our group is devoted to exploring diverse modes of gene regulatory networks, both post-transcriptional gene regulation by small RNAs, structural RNAs, and RNA binding proteins, and transcriptional regulation by transcription factors. In early 1960, Jacob and Monod proposed the first gene regulatory model that genes can be regulated at both transcriptional and post-transcriptional levels. These regulatory elements have shown to regulate a majority of animal transcripts and exert profound control of development and physiology. Thus, their dysfunction has enormous implications in diverse human disease mechanisms. We are particular interested in understanding how these regulatory elements are made, how they evolve, how they regulate their target gene expression, and what biological impact they have on animal development and disease. We work on organisms ranging from insects to vertebrates.

As a computational Group, our research projects are typically multi-disciplinary. We employ a variety of computational approaches, integrating computational machine learning and statistical method development, high-throughput genome-wide data analysis, and molecular genetics/biochemistry experimental validations in collaboration.

We are currently recruiting PhD students as well as Honours students. There are various possible projects for students. As a multi-disciplinary research group, we are interested in students either with a good background in bioinformatics, computer science, statistics, engineering or a good background in molecular biology, biochemistry and some computational skills. If you would like to join, either to develop skills in computational biology or to tackle the proposed research questions, please email me at Jiayu.Wen@anu.edu.au.