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Centre for Evolutionary and Organismal Biology
Welcome to Guojie Zhang's Lab!

On the last page of The Origin of Species, Darwin writes that there is grandeur in the view that all of life had a single beginning from which evolved endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful. In the over 150 years that passed, biology has made tremendous progress understanding the pathways and molecular processes behind the diversification of the life forms, and evolution's fundamental genetic mechanisms that Darwin was unaware of became firmly established via the Neodarwinian synthesis in the first half of the 20th century. The second half of the 20th century added all aspects of social evolution to the Neodarwinian synthesis after W.D. Hamilton developed inclusive fitness theory in the 1960s and 1970s. In spite of these major developments we continue to know very little about the fundamental molecular processes that produce adapted phenotypes in response to variation in the physical and social environment of organisms. The next generation sequencing revolution has
demonstrated this very clearly in that we are now generating reference genomes at a higher rate that we can study how these blueprints translate in responses to natural selection, the adaptations arising from these responses, and the ultimate diversification and speciation processes that may or may not follow. We have developed and applied comparative genomic tools on high throughput '-omics' data to address the classical questions of diversification, adaptation and speciation across a broad spectrum of organisms. Our group is also interested in the evolution of eusocial insects and behaviors. We have initiated and participated in many comparative genomic studies in eusocial insects and now are focusing on the functional genomic study to understand how the genetic and epigenetic processes regulate the caste development and the behavioural plasticity in eusocial insects.
Top News

2024/06/04Prof. Guojie Zhang elected to Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
2024/04/02Our team published a paper in Nature, released the second phase of research findings on the Avian Tree of Life as part of the B10K Genome Project.
2023/07/14Our team published a paper in Cell Research, constructing the first complete diploid human genome.
2023/06/02The Primate Genome Consortium reported a series of publications on Science (special issue). These studies provide new insights on the speciation process, genomic diversity, social evolution, sex chromosomes, and the evolution of the brain and other biological traits.
2023/03/02Our team discovered the underlying causes and evolutionary patterns of variations in terms of the germline mutation rate across species.
2022/10/03Our team published a paper in Nature-Ecology and Evolution, revealing similarities in the development and evolution of ant colonies and multicellular organisms, and found evidence to support the theory that ant colonies are superorganisms.
2022/07/19We have shed new light on the evolutionary pathways that allowed some land animals to transition back into aquatic environments, particularly extremely cold ones such as the seas around Antarctica. The study was published in Nature Communications on July 19.
2022/06/16Our team revealed the brain specialization that accompanies social division of labor in social insects, and constructed a single-cell transcriptome map of the brain covering all roles of labor division in ant society. The results were published in Nature Ecology and Evolution on June 16.
2022/06/10Professor Guojie Zhang was invited to discuss the significance of the T2T genome for life evolution and disease research in Nature Methods.
2022/04/20Our team, together with several research groups, released the research results on the evolution of marsupials. We tackle the problem of why DNA data and morphological characters often show conflicting results when inferring the phylogeny, and why morphological characters often yield unreliable phylogenetic trees. The results were published online in the top international academic journal Cell on April 20, 2022.
2022/04/13Prof. Guojie Zhang's personal homepage has been launched.
2022/02/21Prof. Guojie Zhang joined as Chair Professor in Zhejiang University.
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