Professor

Evolutionary & Ecological Genomics

 

1989-1993, BSc, Hebei University, China

1993-1996, Master, Lanzhou University, China

1996-1999, Ph.D., Wuhan University, China

1999-2001, Postdoc., Institute of Hydrobiology, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

2000-2001, Postdoc., Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier, France

2001-2003, Postdoc., Beijing Normal University, China

2003-2008, Associate Professor, Beijing Normal University, China

2008-present, Professor, Beijing Normal University, China

 

Research Interests

1. The origin and evolution of introns

2. The evolution of genome size

3. How and why various environmental factors could shape the genomes, from their nucleotide composition, their size and the genes they encoded.

 

Selected Publications

♦ Research Articles

1. Li X, Fang C, Zhao J-P, Zhou X-Y, Ni Z, Niu D-K. Desiccation does not drastically increase the accessibility of exogenous DNA to nuclear genomes: evidence from the frequency of endosymbiotic DNA transfer. BMC Genomics. 2020; 21: 452.

2. Aslam S, Lan X-R, Zhang B-W, Chen Z-L, Wang L, Niu D-K. Aerobic prokaryotes do not have higher GC contents than anaerobic prokaryotes, but obligate aerobic prokaryotes have. BMC Evol Biol. 2019; 19: 35.

3. Zhu T, Niu DK. Frequency of intron loss correlates with processed pseudogene abundance: a novel strategy to test the reverse transcriptase model of intron loss. BMC Biol. 2013; 11: 23.

4. Yang YF, Zhu T, Niu DK. Association of intron loss with high mutation rate in Arabidopsis: implications for genome size evolution. Genome Biol Evol. 2013; 5: 723-33.

5. Hou WR, Li M, Niu DK. Counting citations in texts rather than reference lists to improve the accuracy of assessing scientific contribution. BioEssays. 2011; 33: 724-7.

6. Huang YF, Niu DK. Evidence against the energetic cost hypothesis for the short introns in highly expressed genes. BMC Evol Biol. 2008; 8: 154.

7. Niu DK, Hou WR, Li SW. mRNA-mediated intron losses: evidence from extraordinarily large exons. Mol Biol Evol. 2005; 22: 1475-81.

 

♦ Comments

1. Niu DK, Jiang L. Can ENCODE tell us how much junk DNA we carry in our genome? Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 2013; 430: 1340-3

2. Niu DK. Protecting exons from deleterious R-loops: a potential advantage of having introns. Biol Direct. 2007; 2: 11.

3. Niu DK, Chen JK. Evolutionary advantages of cell specialization: Save and protect DNA. J Theor Biol. 1997; 187: 39-43.

 

Contact information

College of Life Sciences,

Beijing Normal University,

Beijing 100875,

P. R. China

Tel. : +86-10-58802064

E-mail: dkniu@bnu.edu.cn