Haoqing Du, 杜昊清
Doctoral candidate
I am a PhD student in the Höhna Lab since Feb 2024. My academic background spans ecology, evolutionary biology, and genomics, and my current work centers on developing phylogenetic models for studying gene expression evolution.
CV
2017-2021 BSc in Ecology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
2021-2023 MSc in Biology, Wageningen Univeristy & Research, Wageningen, Netherlands
2024-Present PhD student, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany
Research Interests
I am an evolutionary biologist with a background in genomics and phylogenetics, specializing in evolution models of gene families and gene expression. My current project is to investigate the sexual dimorphism in fireflies (Family: Lampyridae) within a phylogenetic framework, and I am developing methods to study gene expression of multiple species and individuals across a phylogeny.
© Sebastian Höhna
Modeling gene expression evolution in fireflies
In this project, we use the firefly family (Lampyridae) as a novel study system to investigate gene expression evolution. Fireflies exhibit recurrent sexual dimorphism across the phylogeny. As sexual dimorphism is inherently linked to sex-biased gene expression, this makes fireflies an ideal model for sex-biased gene expression evolution. We collect over 20 firefly species from Europe and Neotropics, with varying levels of sex dimorphism, and generate gene expression data from both sexes. We are developing phylogenetic models that jointly incorporate mean expression levels and within-species variances. Our goal is to uncover how sex-biased gene expression evolves and its relationship with sexual dimorphism across the firefly phylogeny.
The project is part of the Programme (SPP 2349) Genomic Basis of Evolutionary Innovations (Gevol) founded by DFG.