Research
Contents | 
Research Summary
The ultimate goal of biological research is to manipulate traits that are important for medicine, agriculture, and bio-industry. This challenging task first requires good understanding of association between genotype and phenotype. Because of high complexity of genotype as well as phenotype, complexity of the genotype-phenotype association could be even untouchable by combinatorial explosion of the number of possible associations. Therefore, modern genetics needs to be more systematic and predictive. Recently we proposed network-guided approach for genetics of complex traits. First, we construct probabilistic functional gene networks for cells or organisms by benchmarking and integrating heterogeneous multi-omics data that are in general publicly available. Then, using guilt-by-association, and other algorithms of network propagation of known biological information, we predict gene functions, phenotypic effect of loss-of-function, and epistatic interaction. The information can contribute to reconstruction of map between genotype and phenotype. The network-guided genetics method has been effectively applied for various organisms; from simple microbe yeast, to multicellular animal C. elegans, to the reference plant Arabidopsis, to the reference crop rice, and to the human.
Research Philosophy
*4P Research
- Play: Your lab must be your playground.
 - Ponder: More thinking, Less labor.
 - Pride: Be proud of yourself and your work.
 - Provide: Public has been support your work, thus return your discovery to them.
 
*If science is good, scientists must be happy whether they are successful or not. *The more learn, the less know.
Collaborators
- Edward Marcotte, University of Texas at Austin, USA
 - Andrew Fraser, University of Toronto, Canada
 - Ben Lehner, Systems Biology Unit, EMBL-CRG, Spain
 - Rhee, Carnegie Institution of Science, USA
 - Pamela Ronald, University of California at Davis, USA
 - Matthew Hurles, Sanger Institute, UK
 - Philip Benfey, Duke University, USA
 - Sangsun Yoon, Yonsei Medical School, Korea
 - Dongryul Lee, Cha Medical School, Korea
 - Yongsun Bahn, Yonsei University, Korea
 - Sangjun Ha, Yonsei University, Korea