Name:        Jinling Huang
Title:        Assistant Professor
Areas of Study:   Bioinformatics and Molecular Evolution
Phone:         252-328-5623
Email:       huangj@ecu.edu
Office:         Howell Science Building, S202

Research Interests

       I have broad interests in evolutionary biology, comparative and evolutionary genomics, bioinformatics, plant phylogenetics and classification.
      Much of my current research focuses on understanding the role of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in eukaryotic evolution. HGT is the process of genetic changes across the boundaries of species or genomes and has been recognized as an important force in the evolution of life.  In prokaryotes, acquisition of foreign genes from other organisms is considered as the major means to gain novel genes and, therefore, to create beneficial phenotypes and abilities to live in previously unexplored niches. However, the importance of HGT in eukaryotic evolution is less clear. We are currently performing genome analyses to identify transferred genes in eukaryotes and to understand the impact of HGT on the evolution of recipient organisms.
      Opportunities are also available for students who are interested in other related research areas in the lab.

Recent Publications

Huang, J. and J. P. Gogarten. 2007. Did an ancient chlamydial endosymbiosis facilitate the establishment of primary plastids? Genome Biology, 8: R99.

Huang, J. and J. P. Gogarten. 2006. Ancient horizontal gene transfer can benefit phylogenetic reconstruction. Trends in Genetics 22: 361-366.

Huang, J. and J. C. Kissinger. 2006. Horizontal and intracellular gene transfer in the Apicomplexa: the scope and functional consequence. Pp. 123-136 in Genome and Evolution of Microbial Eukaryotes (L. Katz and D. Bhattacharya eds). Oxford University Press.

Bhandarkar, S. M., J. Huang, and J. Arnold. 2006.  An information theoretic approach to genome reconstruction. Pp. 11-1: 26 in Handbook of Computational Molecular Biology (S. Aluru ed). Chapman & Hall/CRC Press.

Huang, J., Y. Xu, and J. P. Gogarten. 2005. The presence of a haloarchaeal type tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase marks the opisthokonts as monophyletic. Molecular Biology and Evolution 22: 2142-2146.

Huang, J., Z. Su, and Y. Xu. 2005. The evolution of microbial phosphonate degradative pathways. Journal of Molecular Evolution 61: 682-690.


Huang, J., D. E. Giannasi, and R. A. Price.  2005. Phylogenetic relationships in Ephedra inferred from chloroplast and nuclear DNA sequences.  Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 35: 48-59.

Huang, J., N. Mullapudi, C. A. Lancto et al. 2004. Phylogenomic evidence supports past endosymbiosis, intracellular and horizontal gene transfer in Cryptosporidium parvum. Genome Biology 5: R88.

Striepen, B, A., J. P. Pruijssers, J. Huang, C. Li et al. 2004. Gene transfer in the evolution of parasite nucleotide biosynthesis.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 101: 3154-3159.

Huang, J, N. Mullapudi, T. Sicheritz-Ponten, and J. C. Kissinger.  2004. A first glimpse into the pattern and scale of gene transfer in the Apicomplexa. International Journal for Parasitology 34: 265-274.

Huang, J. and S. M. Bhandarkar.  2003. A comparison of physical mapping algorithms based on the maximum likelihood model.  Bioinformatics 19: 1303-1310.

Huang, J. and R. A. Price.  2003.  Estimation of the age of extant Ephedra using chloroplast rbcL sequence data.  Molecular Biology and Evolution 20: 435-440.

Bhandarkar, S. M., J. Huang, J. Arnold. 2003.  A parallel genetic algorithm for physical mapping of chromosomes. Pp. 567-572 in Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Bioinformatics Conference. IEEE Press: Piscataway, NJ.


Teaching

    Bioinformtics
    Taxonomy of Vascular Plants