On July 11, 2016, Prof. Rong Li, from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Whiting School, gave a lecture entitled A numbers game: rapid cellular evolution driven by chromosome instability and stoichiometry imbalance, which was organized by the host Prof. Bing Zhu as one of the parts of the special lecture named“BEI Shizhang Lecture” of Institute of Biophysics.

The genome of each eukaryotic species is divided into a certain number of chromosomes. For example, human beings have 46 chromosomes while chimpanzees have 48. 

Aneuploidy is an unbalanced change in chromosome number on a cellular or organismal level. In an aneuploid cell, the chromosome number is altered compared to the normal euploid genome of a given species. 

In this lecture, Prof Rong Li  demonstrated that aneuploidy directly affects gene expression at both transcriptome and proteome levels and can generate significant phenotypic variation that brings about adaptive evolution under diverse conditions.