The last two months have been an amazing journey, chaotic, exausting, painful, while so amazingly fruitful. I started from knowing very little about grant proposal writing, struggled everyday to clarify my own thinkings about the science and research plan, but eventually managed to finish writing a NSF grant proposal (as Co-PI) in time for submission! Of course, with all the help and guidance from my superviser, and intellectual and spiritual supports from my colleagues! This whole procedure was so not limited to presenting the science and new ideas, or writing skills. The exta work was beyong my imagination: preparing various supplemental documents, studying policy of the grant agency, locating resources and assistance, going through the university administrative process, communications and soliciting reviews and suport. I really knew nothing before, but feel so fourtunate to know something about this crazy world!
The research project we proposed Chromatin dynamics and gene expression responses to speciation, polyploidy and stress, is everything what I have dreamed about doing since receiving my PhD back in 2013. From my doctoral work on proteomics and later on transcriptomics in response to genome evolution, the complicated patterns of duplicate gene expression evolution are so facinating but also so complicated. Several key phenomena have been described and repeartly measured in different polyploid systems, but reaching beneath the surface to the “rules” governing different patterns observed is the ultimate goal. Will describing nucleosome organization simply become another layer of “patterns” (or new “phenotype”) in this round of searching for “rules” governing gene regulation, just like DNA methylation, histone modification and other epigenomic features? Probably, and quite likely. But I do believe, it will lead us one-step closer to the ultimate goal, and will stimulate new ideas and methods for better solutions.
Along this journal of grant writing, a manuscript about An analytical framework to understand regulatory novelty accompanying allopolyploidization was totally not planned, but everything came together naturally after clarifying the thinking about duplicated gene expression. It became my very first BioRxiv preprint, also a fresh and pleasant experience. :)