Please join us for our monthly Biomedical Data Science Grand Rounds with John Quackenbush, PhD, Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, on Thursday, June 11 at 12:00 p.m. via Zoom. 

Talk title: “Using Networks to Link Genotype to Phenotype”

URL: https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/5037795102

Meeting ID: 503-779-5102

Host: Tamar Wheeler, BWF Fellow and Candidate for PhD in MCB

Talk Summary 

One of the central tenants of biology is that our genetics—our genotype—influences the physical characteristics we manifest—our phenotype. But with more than 25,000 human genes and more than 6,000,000 common genetic variants mapped in our genome, finding associations between our genotype and phenotype is an ongoing challenge. Indeed, genome-wide association studies have found thousands of small effect size genetic variants that are associated with phenotypic traits and disease. The simplest explanation is that these genetic variants work synergistically to help define phenotype and to regulate processes that are responsible for phenotypic state transitions. We will use gene expression and genetic data to explore gene regulatory networks, to study phenotypic state transitions, and to analyze the connections between genotype, gene expression, and phenotype. We have found that the networks, and their structure, provide unique insight into how genetic elements interact with each other and the structure of the network has predictive power for identifying SNPs likely to be associated with phenotype through genome wide association studies. I will show multiple examples, drawing on my work in cancer, in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and in the analysis of data from thirty-eight tissues provided by the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project.

Biography

John Quackenbush is Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and Professor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. John’s PhD was in Theoretical Physics, but in 1992 he received a fellowship to work on the Human Genome Project. This led him through the Salk Institute, Stanford University, and The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), before moving to Harvard in 2005. John’s research uses massive data to probe how many small effects combine to influence our health and risk of disease. His more than 300 papers have been cited more than 74,000 times and among his honors is recognition in 2013 as a White House Open Science Champion of Change.