Qunfeng Dong

1
Qunfeng Dong

• I received B.S. in Biochemistry from Wuhan
  University (China) in 1993. Then at Iowa State
  University (ISU), after I obtained my
  Biochemistry Ph.D. (molecular and cell biology)
  in 2000 and briefly spent Post-doc training (NMR
  protein structure calculation) in 2001, I had
  been working as a staff scientist leading major
  NSF-funded plant genome databases development at
  ISU. Over the years at ISU, I managed to learn
  bioinformatics by taking classes, reading papers,
  but most importantly by doing research and
  collaborating with many other bright brains.
• In Oct 2006, I left ISU and joined the Center for
  Genomics and Bioinformatics (CGB) as
  Bioinformatics Director (a non-tenure-track
  faculty position) at Indiana University.

2
Research Area of Interest

• Comparative genomics - Identify and understand
  functional units in genomes (what are they, where
  are they, what do they do, how were they
  evolved).
• Cyberinfrastructure - Develop databases and
  analysis tools to facilitate comparative genome
  research, gene-expression analysis, and etc.
• Collaboration - Data analysis (sequence and
  expression) for OTHER biologists. If I dont know
  how to do it myself (or within expertise of the
  CGB), I approach computer scientists and
  statisticians by defining the biological
  challenges as CS. or Stat. problems for clear
  communications.

3
Methods Used

• Databases (e.g., MySQL).
• General sequence and molecular phylogeny analysis
  tools (e.g., BLAST, CAP3, PAML). Usually I write
  a lot of Perl scripts.
• Statistical tools (e.g., R)

4
Most significant contribution

• PlantGDB (www.plantgdb.org)
• Dong, Q., Wilkerson, M.D. Brendel, V. (2007)
  Tracembler - software for in-silico chromosome
  walking in unassembled genomes. BMC
  Bioinformatics, Sumitted January 15, 2007.
• Schlueter, S.D., Wilkerson, M.D., Dong, Q.
  Brendel, V. (2006) xGDB open-source
  computational infrastructure for the integrated
  evaluation and analysis of genome features.
  Genome Biol. 7, R111.
• Dong, Q., Lawrence, C.J., Schlueter, S.D.,
  Wilkerson, M.D., Kurtz, S., Lushbough, C.
  Brendel, V. (2005) Comparative plant genomics
  resources at PlantGDB. Plant Physiol. 139,
  610-618.