Dr Bu-Jun Shi

  • Biography/ Background

    Dr Bu-Jun Shi completed his undergraduate studies in Chemistry and Master Degree in Plant (Biochemical) Virology and then worked as a Lecturer at a Chinese university. In 1993, he enrolled at the University of Adelaide as a PhD student with a prestigious international scholarship funded by the Australian Government to study Molecular Virology. After he was awarded his PhD in 1997, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow for various projects like cucumoviral RNA-RNA recombination, rice blast disease resistance genes, and yeast transcription factors in cell cycle control. In 2004, he became a group leader at the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics to study cereal genetics and genomics, especially functional microRNAs in drought stress tolerance of barley. In 2015, he was appointed an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide. 

  • Research Interests

    Dr Bu-Jun Shi’s research interests mainly focus on identification of the microRNAs that are regulated under abiotic stresses in cereal crops. The aim of this research is to utilise identified functionally important microRNAs in abiotic stress tolerance of cereal crops for developing new varieties that are tolerant to abiotic stresses and high yielding in the future. 

  • Publications

    Dr Bu-Jun Shi has so far published over 50 papers in journals including Nature, Science, Genes and Development, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), of which he is the first author for 24 and corresponding author for 29. He has also published three books and 7 book chapters. The impact of his work has been recognised through invitations to speak at international conferences and to review manuscripts and proposals for numerous journals, publishers and funding agencies.

    A Selection of Publications of the Last 10 Years

    v   Peer-reviewed papers (*corresponding author)

    1.             Shi, B.J. (2016). Decoding the role of each domain in two forkhead transcription factors Fkh1 and Fkh2 in cell cycle regulation. Biochemical Journal 473, 3855–3869.

    2.             Hackenberg, M., Rueda, A., Gustafson, P., Langridge, P. and Shi, B.J.* (2016). Generation of different sizes and classes of small RNAs in barley is locus, chromosome and/or cultivar-dependent. BMC Genomics doi: 10.1186/s12864-016-3023-5.

    3.             Shen, W.X., Aub P.C.K., Shi, B.J., Smith, N.A., Dennisb, E.S., Guo, H.S., Zhou C.Y. and Wang M.B. (2015). Satellite RNAs interfere with the function of viral RNA silencing suppressors. Frontiers in Plant Science doi: 10.3389/fpls.2015.00281.

    4.             Ferdous, J., Hussain, S.S. and Shi, B.J.* (2015). Role of microRNAs in plant drought tolerance. Plant Biotechnology Journal 13, 293-305.

    5.             Ferdous, J., Li, Y., Reid, N., Langridge, P., Shi, B.J.* and Tricker, P. (2015). Identification of reference genes for quantitative expression analysis of microRNAs and mRNAs in barley under various stress conditions. PLos ONE doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0118503.

    6.             Hackenberg, M., Gustafson, P., Langridge, P. and Shi, B.J.* (2015). Differential expression of microRNAs and other small RNAs in barley between water and drought conditions. Plant Biotechnology Journal 13, 2-13.

    7.             Barturen, G., Rueda, A., Hamberg, M., Alganza, A., Lebron, R., Kotsyfakis, M., Shi, B.J., Koppers-Lalic, D. and Hackenberg, M. (2014). sRNAbench: profiling of small RNAs and its sequence variants in single or multi-species high-throughput experiments. Methods Next-Generation Seq. 1, 21–31.

    8.             Salman, T.M., Habili, N. and Shi, B.J.* (2014). Effect of Temperature on Symptom Expression and Sequence Polymorphism of Grapevine Yellow Speckle Viroid 1 in Grapevine. Virus Research, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.virusres.2014.03.28.

    9.             Hackenberg, M., Shi, B.J.*, Gustafson, P. and Langridge, P. (2013). Characterization of phosphorus-regulated miR399 and miR827 and their isomirs in barley under different phosphorus conditions. BMC Plant Biology 13, 214  doi:10.1186/1471-2229-13-214.

    10.         Hackenberg, M., Huang, P.J., Huang, C.Y., Shi, B.J.*, Gustafson P. and Langridge P. (2012). A Comprehensive Expression profile of microRNAs and other classes of non-coding small RNAs in barley under phosphorous-deficient and -sufficient conditions. DNA Research 19, 1–17.

    11.         Hackenberg, M., Shi, B.J.*, Gustafson, P. and Langridge, P. (2012). A transgenic transcription factor (TaDREB3) in barley affects the expression of microRNAs and other small non-coding RNAs. PLoS ONE 7, e42030. doi:10.1371.

    12.         Mayer, K.F.X., Waugh, R., Langridge, P., Close, T.J., Wise, R.P., Graner, A., Matsumoto, T., Sato, K., Schulman, A., Ariyadasa, R., Schulte, D., Poursarebani, N., Zhou, R., Steuernagel, B., Mascher, M., Scholz, U., Shi, B.J.,  et al. (2012). A physical, genetic and functional sequence assembly of the barley genome. Nature 491, 711-717.

    13.         Gao, L.L., Hane, J., Kamphuis, L.G., Foley, R., Shi, B.J., Atkins, C. and Singh, K.B. (2011). Development of genomic resources for the narrow-leafed lupin (Lupinus angustifolius): construction of a Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) library and BAC-end sequencing. BMC Genomics 12, 521.

    14.         Shi, B.J.* and Palukaitis, P. (2011). The N-terminal 12 amino acids of tomato aspermy virus 2b protein function in infection and recombination. Journal of General Virology 92, 2706-2710.

    15.         Huang, C.Y. Shirley, N. Genc, Y. Shi, B.J. and Langridge, P. (2011). Phosphate utilization efficiency correlates with expression of low-affinity phosphate transporters and non-coding RNA, IPS1 in barley. Plant Physiology 156, 1217–1229.

    16.         Schulte, D., Ariyadasa, R., Shi, B.J., Fleury, D., Saski, C., Atkins, M., deJong, P., Wu, C.C., Graner, A., Langridge, P. and Stein, N. (2011). BAC library resources for map-based cloning and physical map construction in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). BMC Genomics 12, 247.

    17.         Liu, H., McNicol, J., Bayer, M., Morris, J.A., Cardle, L., Marshall, D.F., Schulte, D., Stein, N., Shi, B.J., Taudien, S., Waugh, R. and Hedley, P.E. (2011). Highly parallel gene-to-BAC addressing using microarrays. Biotechniques 50, 165-74.

    18.         Schreiber, A. W., Shi, B.J.*, Huang, C.Y., Langridge, P. and Baumann, U. (2011). Discovery of barley miRNAs through deep sequencing of short reads. BMC Genomics 12, 129.

    19.         Shi, B.J.*, Sutton T., Collins, N. C. Pallotta, M. and Langridge, P. (2010). Construction of a barley bacterial artificial chromosome library suitable for cloning genes for boron tolerance, sodium exclusion and high grain zinc content. Plant Breeding 129, 291-296.

    20.         Shi, B.J., Gustafson, J.P., Button, J., Miyazaki, J., Pallotta, M., Gustafson, N., Zhou, H., Langridge, P. and Collins, N.C. (2009). Physical analysis of the complex rye (Secale cereale L.) Alt4 aluminium (aluminium) tolerance locus using a whole-genome BAC library of rye cv. Blanco. Theoretical and Applied Genetics 119, 695–704.

    21.         Shi, B.J.*, Symons, R.H. and Palukaitis, P. (2009). Stability and competitiveness of interviral recombinant RNAs derived from a chimeric cucumovirus. Virus Research 140, 216-221.

    22.         Shi, B.J.*, Gustafson, J.P. and Langridge, P. (2008). A simple TAE-based method to generate large insert BAC libraries from plant species. In: Methods in Plant Molecular Biology.  Methods in Molecular Biology 513, 57-80.

    23.         Shi, B.J.* and Wang, G.L. (2008). Comparative study of genes expressed from rice fungus resistant and susceptible lines during interactions with Magnaporthe oryzae. Gene 427, 80-85.

    24.         Shi, B.J.*, Symons, R.H. and Palukaitis, P. (2008). The cucumovirus 2b gene drives selection of inter-viral recombinants affecting the crossover site, the acceptor RNA and the rate of selection. Nucleic Acids Res. 36, 1057-1071.

    25.         Sutton, T., Baumann, U., Hayes, J., Collins, N.C., Shi, B.J., Schnurbusch, T., Hay, A., Mayo, G., Pallotta, M. Tester, M. and Langridge, P. (2007). Boron-Toxicity Tolerance in Barley Arising from Efflux Transporter Amplification. Science 30, 1446–1449.

    v   Book chapters

    1.             Shi, B.J. (2016). MicroRNAs: potential sources and tools in enhancing plant tolerance to drought. In: Drought Tolerance in Plants. pp 227-247. Edited by D.J. Burritt, A. Hossain, S. Hussain Wani, and S. Bhattacharjee (Springer, Switzerland), ISBN: 978-3-319-32421-0.

    2.             Shi, B.J. and Hussain, S.S. (2016). MicroRNA/siRNA-based approaches to enhance drought tolerance of barley and wheat under drought stress. In: Water Stress and Crop Plants: A Sustainable Approach. pp 248-260. Edited by Parvaiz, A. (John Wiley, UK), ISBN: 978-1-119-05436-8.

    3.             Hussain, S.S., Ahsan, M.A., Rashid, B. and Shi, B.J.  (2016). Plant aquaporin biotechnology: Challenges and prospects for abiotic stress tolerance under a changing global environment. In: Water Stress and Crop Plants: A Sustainable Approach. pp 150-164. Edited by Parvaiz, A. (John Wiley, UK), ISBN: 978-1-119-05436-8.

    4.             Hussain, S.S., Ahsan, M.A., Sornaraj, P., Ali, M. and Shi, BJ. (2016). Toward integration of a systems-based approach for understanding drought stress in plants. In: Water Stress and Crop Plants: A Sustainable Approach. pp 227-247. Edited by Parvaiz, A. (John Wiley, UK), ISBN: 978-1-119-05436-8.

    5.             Hussain, S.S., Ali, M. and Shi, B.J. (2015). MicroRNA-mediated regulatory functions under abiotic stresses in legumes. In: Legumes under environmental stress; yield, improvement and adaptions. pp 231-245. Edited by Mohamed, M.A. and Parvaiz, A. (John Wiley, UK), ISBN: 978-1-118-91708-4.

    6.             Hussain, S.S. and Shi, B.J. (2014). Role of miRNAs in abiotic and biotic stresses in plants. In: Global Climate Change: Emerging Technology and Crop Improvement. pp 181-207. Edited by Parvaiz, A. and Saiema, R. (John Wiley, UK), ISBN: 978-0-12-800876-8.

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Entry last updated: Monday, 26 Dec 2016