Melanie Quiver successfully defends PhD

Congratulations to Melanie Quiver who defended her PhD thesis on the evolution of eQTL across human populations and tissues. Melanie was Joe Lachance’s first graduate student and has pioneered work linking regulatory variation to divergence of allele frequencies under drift and selection. She intends to return to Arizona to work in her Navajo community and will be greatly missed in EBB.

Pastrami software for fast ancestry inference at Biobank scale.

The Jordan lab has developed a fast and computationally efficient method for fine-scale ancestry inference in Biobank-scale studies. The algorithm, “Pastrami”, relies on supervised comparison of query haplotypes and global references. In the paper they use it to estimate ancestry proportions in African, UK, and American genome datasets with CPU usage 50X less than existing standard software. The code is available open source at GitHub: https://github.com/healthdisparities/pastrami

Cross-tissue map of single cell pathology in Crohn’s disease published by Savannah Washburn.

A collaboration between the CIG groups of Peng Qiu and Greg Gibson, along with Subra Kugathasan at Emory, has resulted in a comprehensive single cell mapping of Crohn’s disease across three regions of the gut. Signatures related to cytokine signaling and extracellular matrix composition are mapped to specific cell types using tensor decomposition. This work was funded by the Helmsley Foundation/