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Transcriptional rewiring generates phenotypic novelty during evolutionary divergence in all organisms. The detailed molecular mechanisms underlying transcriptional rewiring are not fully understood and the diverse transcriptional regulatory networks are not comprehensively delineated. A research team led by Dr. Jun-Yi Leu at the Institute of Molecular Biology, Academia Sinica characterized the Sef1 regulatory networks in different yeast species, and demonstrated that an incompletely rewired Sef1 network can evolve strong phenotypic divergence by using a conserved target gene NDE1 with a new function. The study provided novel insights to understand the evolutionary trajectories of transcriptional regulatory networks. The research has been published on November 20, 2024 in Nucleic Acids Research. The first and co-corresponding author is Dr. Po-Chen Hsu, the IMB senior scientist. Collaborators include Dr. Tzu-Chiao Lu at the Baylor College of Medicine and Dr. Po-Hsiang Hung at the Stanford University. This study was supported by the Investigator Project Grant (Academia Sinica) and Frontier Science Research Program (National Science and Technology Council).