Dr. Yang Bi is currently an assistant professor of the Department of Biology at the Hong Kong Baptist University. He obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University under the supervision of Dr. Zhiyong Wang and continued to work with Zhiyong at the Carnegie Institution for Science for his postdoctoral research. He used a combination of molecular, genetic, biochemical, and proteomic approaches to study signal transduction in plants. His prior research illustrated how phosphocoding of common signaling components deconvolute phytohormone signal and immunity signal to ensure signal specificities, demonstrated that the nutrient-sensing O-glycosylation modifications regulate the functions of an RNA-binding protein involved in RNA alternative splicing, developmental transitions, and stress responses, and recently developed an innovative proteomic approach to profile the O-fucosylated proteome in plants.
Although O-glycosylation is considered a highly conserved nutrient sensing mechanism in eukaryotes, O-glycobiology in plants is still at its infancy. Dr. Bi plans to carry out in-depth analysis of the O-glycosylation-mediated nutrient signaling pathway, thereby providing new insight for improving nutrient utilization in plants.
