Monday was Guoqin Yu's last day.  Dr. Yu was here for 20 months on a recovery-act-funded project to understand the origins of new proteins.  The lead PI on the project is my colleague John Moult.  Last Friday we had a going-away party with pizza and snacks.  On her last day, we were finishing up a manuscript on her analysis of ORFan genes in E. coli.  In an analysis of 35 E. coli genome sequences, there are many thousands of apparent genes not found in other species ("ORFans").  Most of these are found in only a single genome.  However, when an ORFan gene is found in multiple genomes, we have the opportunity to look at the accumulation of within-population sequence diversity such as synonymous and non-synonymous nucleotide differences.  Dr. Yu finds that ORFans accumulate synonymous differences similar to non-ORFans, but they accumulate more non-synonymous differences, for reasons that are not yet clear. 

Dr. Yu is moving to another post-doc position at the National Cancer Institute, where she will have a choice of bioinformatics projects relating to the metagenomics of cancer.  We wish her success in her new position.