Events for January 12, 2022 - November 29, 2021

TITLE: Cis-regulatory divergence between highland and lowland deer mice populations highlight the essential role of pleiotropic genes for high-altitude adaptation. ABSTRACT: Variation in gene expression regulation contributes extensively to phenotypic diversity within and between species and plays a major role in complex trait evolution. However, the characterization of the genetic basis of regulatory variation is […]

TITLE: "scPNMF: sparse gene encoding of single cells to facilitate gene selection for targeted gene profiling." ABSTRACT: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) captures whole transcriptome information of individual cells. While scRNA-seq measures thousands of genes, researchers are often interested in only dozens to hundreds of genes for a closer study. Then a question is how to […]

TITLE: "A state space model to characterize the phenotypic variation in a panel of drug treatment time course experiments." ABSTRACT: As new technologies enable high throughput collection of marker measurements in drug treatment time course experiments, we are faced with a need to characterize the observed cellular behaviors over time.  I will present a model […]

TITLE: The evolution and co-evolution of PRDM9 across vertebrates ABSTRACT: In sexually reproducing organisms, meiotic recombination is initiated by the deliberate infliction of numerous double-strand breaks (DSBs) in the genome, the repair of which yields crossover and non-crossover resolutions. In most mammals, these DSBs are specified through the binding of PRDM9 and the deposition of […]

TITLE: "Linking exposure dose to infectious disease development using mechanistic models" (using SARS-CoV-2 in a mouse model as an illustration) ABSTRACT: Disease development after exposure to a pathogen does not follow a yes/no process, but rather a spectrum of disease manifestations influenced by host, pathogen and environmental factors. In particular, exposure dose can impact incubation time, […]

TITLE: “Inferring positive selection in the human gut microbiome using signatures of genetic linkage.” ABSTRACT: The human gut microbiome is composed of hundreds of simultaneously evolving species that can affect human health. However, fundamental features of genetic diversity have yet to be leveraged to identify genes that contribute towards microbial adaptation. One such feature is the […]

TITLE: "Quantifying response-specificity to diverse immune threats from single cell transcriptomes" ABSTRACT: Innate immune sentinel cells such as macrophages upregulate over a thousand genes in the minutes to hours following an encounter with pathogen invaders or damage signals. Previous bulk transcriptomic studies suggest there is stimulus-specificity in the combinations of genes that are activated. However, bulk […]

TITLE: "Efficient variance components analysis across millions of genomes." ABSTRACT: While variance components analysis has emerged as a powerful tool in complex trait genetics, existing methods for fitting variance components do not scale well to large-scale datasets of genetic variation. I will present a method for variance components analysis that is accurate and efficient: capable of […]

TITLE: "Asymptotic-Numerical Method For Cell Focusing in Microfluidic Channel." ABSTRACT: Inertial microfluidic devices use inertial lift forces to organize the spacing and positions of cells carried by flow.  A hybrid asymptotic-numerical method is presented that can calculate the migration velocities of cells in a channel by representing them as a combination singularities and discontinuities. Refinements […]

TITLE: "A pan-cancer landscape analysis of molecular and functional genomics in tumor proliferation." ABSTRACT: Rapid proliferation is a central hallmark of cancer and is associated with poor prognosis in most cancer types. My overall goal is to understand the mechanisms by which specific driver mutations and mutational signatures influence rates of tumor proliferation within and […]