About me

Hi! I am Xuan Ouyang (欧阳轩, pronounced as Shwan Oh-yang). I’m a senior in Integrated Science Program at Peking University, under the supervision of Jie Lin. I was an summer intern in Terence Hwa’s Lab at Department of Physics, U.C. San Diego. In addition, I will join Daniel Lew’s Lab from January to March 2024 as a research intern at Biology Department, MIT. I have broad research interests in quantatitve and system biology, genetics, and microbiology which originates from a rigorous integrative training offered by Intergrated Science Program, and broad research experiences at three extensive collaborative research institutes at Peking(CQB), UCSD(Physical Biology) and MIT(Biology).

Selected Research

Whole-genome sRNA-mediated gene expression regulations

Supervised by Matteo Mori and Terence Hwa

sRNA plays a central regulatory role in gene expression primarily by complementarily binding to induce co-degradation or alter mRNA spatial conformation, affecting mRNA stability or translation ability. By integrating the omics data across conditions including nutrient limitation, translation inhibition, and nutrient shift conditions with corresponding quantitative experiment results, I provided the landscape of by deciphering sRNA-mediated gene expression regulation from perspective of mRNA stability and translation ability. Below is the genome-wide sRNA-mediate gene expression map under carbon-limitation(by limiting the numbers of glucose transporters) condition.

Revealing the Relations between Promoter Sequences Patterns and Gene Expression Levels

Supervised by Terence Hwa

Recent findings underscore basal expression levels, dictated by corresponding promoter strength, primarily determine gene expression levels–quantified by protein abundance, which means E. coli sets the gene expression level by evolutionarily organizing promoter strengths. In addition, The conservation of basal expression levels across diverse bacteria implies the feasibility of gene expression level prediction among species, provided their genomes are available. In this project, I deciphered this evolutionary strategy from the perspective of promoter sequences, a fundamental internal promoter property. I picked housekeeping sigma70 promoters as the primary system, and identified promoter sequence patterns dependent on and independent of promoter strength through sequence information entropy and nucleotide frequency analysis. Below is the patterns revealed in near-promoter regions. I highlight the regions with high information. 0 here is the transcription start site.

Mechanism of Accurate Division in E. coli and its Response to Hyperosmotic Shock

Supervised by Jie Lin

A remarkable feature of living cells is their ability to uphold a stable, environment-influenced cell size amidst internal temporal fluctuations and individual variations along with drastic changes in environmental factors like osmolarity and extracellular nutrients, while the strategy remains an open question. Focusing on the MinCDE system, which positions the division machinery spatiotemporally and is crucial for effective division in E. coli, I investigated the division strategy and dynamic adjustment under osmotic shock.