Graduate students Alex Fish and Corinne Simonti have both been awarded talks at this year’s Keystone meeting on Understanding the Function of Human Genome Variation! If you happen to be in Sweden this June, stop by!

Congratulations to Joanna Zhang for winning a Vanderbilt Undergraduate Summer Research Program fellowship to fund her work on the evolution of gene regulation in pregnancy this summer!

American Voices

We are very pleased that our analysis of the clinical effects of Neanderthal DNA that remains in modern humans using more than 28,000 individuals from Vanderbilt’s BioVU database and the eMERGE Network has been published in Science:

The phenotypic legacy of admixture between modern humans and Neandertals

The article has been getting some great press from: NPR, The Atlantic, Wall St. Journal, and many more.

A project we contributed to led by Rob Williams at UT Memphis that carried out a joint phenome-wide association study in mice and humans was just published in Nature Communications. Check it out:

Joint mouse–human phenome-wide association to test gene function and disease risk

We are very excited to welcome David Rinker to the group as a Postdoctoral Scholar! David joins us after a very successful PhD using genomic approaches to study mosquito olfaction. He will be funded by our recent R01 and studying the dynamics of epigenetic modifications and gene expression over cellular development.

The manuscript describing the GEneSTATION server for integrating evolutionary and functional genomic data to study the evolution of pregnancy-associated tissues and phenotypes has been published in NAR. Check it out here.

Corinne and I wrote a review article about emerging areas in the study of human genome evolution for Current Opinion in Genetics and Development. Check it out here:

The Evolution of the Human Genome

Corinne’s work on understanding the effects of Neanderthal haplotypes in modern humans using data from the eMERGE network was featured in a Nature News article: Neanderthals had outsize effect on human biology

We are very grateful to the Vanderbilt Center for Quantitative Sciences for funding our pilot project. Working together with Bennett Landman’s group, we will build a pipeline for integrating phenotypes extracted from medical images and genetic information from Vanderbilt’s BioVU database. This will enable us to test the effects of many evolutionarily and clinically relevant mutations on a wide range of human phenotypes.