Short Bio

I am a systems biologist with backgrounds in both biology and mathematics. Majored in biology and mathematics, I received my B.S. from Peking University in 2008. There I did research in both synthetic biology and computational genomics. I was the student leader of the first iGEM team of Peking University, and we won the grand prize in 2007. After a year in Caltech, I decided to pursue my PhD degree with Ariel B. Lindner and François Taddei in Paris.

I joined the CRI and INSERM U1001 as a PhD student in 2010. I finished and defended my dissertation entitled “Physiological constraints and evolutionary trade-offs underlying bacterial aging, caloric restriction and longevity”, and received my PhD in April 2016. Now I’m working as a postdoctoral researcher focusing on the statistical and evolutionary modeling of cellular mortality.

Research Interests

My research aims to understand the origin of aging, with E.coli as a model organism. I combine an experimental approach where we use microfluidic bacterial culture and time-lapse microscopy to measure longitudinally the life history and physiology of large populations of single cells; and demographic models of aging where we can define quantitatively the modes and rates of aging. I also use coarse-grained physiological models of bacterial growth and stress response to understand the fitness trade-offs and physiological constraints that shape the aging phenotypes

Selected Publications

Yang YF, Santos AL, Xu LP, Chen PP, Taddei F, Lindner AB. Escherichia coli general stress response delays aging in adaptation to feast-or-famine life history. In prep. Jan. 2017.

Yang Y, Song X, Lindner AB. Time-lapse microscopy and image analysis of Escherichia coli cells in mother machines, vol. 43 of Methods in Microbiology, chap. 2, 49-68 (Elsevier, 2016).

Izard J, Gomez Balderas CD, Ropers D, Lacour S, Song X, Yang Y, Lindner AB, Geiselmann J, de Jong H. A synthetic growth switch based on controlled expression of RNA polymerase. Mol. Syst. Biol. 2015 Nov 23;11(11):840.

Hu GQ, Zheng X, Yang YF, Ortet P, She ZS, Zhu H. ProTISA: a comprehensive resource for translation initiation site annotation in prokaryotic genomes. Nucleic Acids Res. 2008 Jan;36(Database issue):D114-9.

iGEM, Peking University 2007. http://2007.igem.org/Peking