About Manyuan Long
I joined the Chicago faculty in November 1997 in the Department of Ecology and Evolution and the College, after postdoctoral researches at Harvard with Walter Gilbert and Richard Lewontin. I received Ph.D. in December 1992 at the University of California at Davis in the laboratory of Charles Langley. A serendipitous finding of jingwei in African Drosophila, the first new gene ever known that was generated by retroposition and exon shuffling, in my doctoral research ignited my passion in a new and big problem: how does a new gene originate and evolve? I have been working on this problem since my years at Davis and found more and more interesting and challenging with the new gene problem. After years indulged in the rates, patterns and mechanisms of new gene evolution, I am attracted to the phenotypic evolution and expression network evolution driven by new genes. I am examining the evolutionary forces underlying new gene evolution and related phenotypic evolution, including evolutionary force 1 -- the natural selection for adaptation and evolutionary force 2 -- the sexual selection for reproductive success, proposed by Charles Darwin, and other forces such as the neutrality and the conflict in evolution of genes and genomes.
Recent Comments
As I commented briefly in a blog of the nature ecology evolution research community (March 26, 2019), our recent paper in Nature Ecology and Evolution (Zhang et al, 2019) and the other one in Nature Ecology & Evolution (Vankuren and Long, 2018) received excellent reviews, definitely among the top 5 papers that received the best reviews in my career (the other three including Zhang et al (2011, PLoS Biology), Zhang et al (2004. PNAS) , Long and Langley (1993, Science). I use the words “excellent” and “best”, not because those reviewers endorsed or editors accepted our papers but their high standard of scientific researches, professional levels in the related fields and publication, and their roles in improvement of these papers in science and presentation. Some of these reviewers were so generous and even participated in further analyses of the data we presented in those manuscripts, generated significant results and encouraged us to use in the manuscripts.
For example, our 2018 paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution is such an example, in which a reviewer pointed out an additional candidate gene duplication for resolving sexual conflict, promoting us to do further analyses in other Drosophila lineages. We found additional two more candidates. We are grateful to this reviewer but regretted we even could not mention his or her name in the acknowledgement because, for an understandable reason, the editorial rules of Nature Ecology and Evolution did not share with us the names of reviewers and did not allow us to say a Thank You to the reviewer in the end of the paper. I wish these anonymous reviewers would know our gratitude to their hard work and generosity with their critical comments, which contribute to a beauty of intellectual life in the world of scientists.