November 2008

University of Michigan Statistical Genetics Trainees Win Awards at ASHG November 18, 2008

Two University of Michigan Center for Statistical Genetics trainees were honored Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in Philadelphia. Biostatistics student Yun Li won an award for the best abstract and presentation among pre-doctoral candidates in the basic sciences. Li's talk on "Efficient Reconstruction of Whole Genomes Using Massively Parallel Shotgun Sequence Data." focused on efficient and accurate genotype calling methods for high throughput sequence analysis. Her abstract, joint with her advisor Goncalo Abecasis, was selected from among the >2000 abstracts submitted to the meeting, which was attended by nearly 5000 scientists from around the world.

Alumna Karen Conneely (PhD Biostatistics 2008) was one of two recipients of the Cotterman Award, named after the first editor of the American Journal of Human Genetics and given each year to honor the best papers by a graduate or post-graduate student. Conneely's paper "So many correlated tests, so little time! Rapid adjustment of p-values for multiple correlated tests", joint work with former graduate advisor Michael Boehnke, focused on assessment of statistical significance given large numbers of dependent tests, as occurs in genetic studies that examine multiple related traits, markers, or models. Conneely previously had presented the work at the 2007 ASHG meeting in San Diego. Conneely is the fourth Center for Statistical Genetics trainee to win the Cotterman award in the last three years, joining Mingyao Li (advisors Abecasis and Boehnke, 2005), Charles Krafchak (Julia Richards, 2006), and Paul Scheet (Mathew Stephens and Goncalo Abecasis, 2006).

Congratulations Yun and Karen!

June 2008

Kristen Stevens, an Epidemiology PhD student in her 2nd year in the Genome Sciences Training Program, is featured in the SPH Findings Magazine for Spring/Summer 2008. Read the interview with Kristen.

May 2008

John V. Moran, associate professor of human genetics at the U-M Medical School, has been appointed as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He is among 56 top scientists nationally who have been appointed as investigators.

Dr. Moran is a pioneer in understanding the biology of common repetitive DNA elements in the human genome often dismissed as "junk" DNA. He leads a group of U-M researchers who examine how these repetitive elements impact the evolution of the human genome.

Dr. Moran examines a class of "jumping genes" called LINE-1 elements, which are a perplexing class of repetitive DNA in the human genome. These repetitive elements make up roughly 17 percent of human genetic material, but once were largely ignored and disparaged as "junk". The bulk of this "junk" DNA appears to have been been carried down from our distant evolutionary past and can be considered to be molecular fossils.

Dr. Moran and his laboratory have shown that some LINE-1 elements can still jump and that their mobility can impact the human genome in a myriad of ways. The lab has developed tools from the fields of genetics, molecular biology and biochemistry to systematically study LINE-1 movement in cultured human cells.

Dr. Moran continues to study why, when and how often LINE-1 elements jump to new locations, with the long-range goal of understanding how the process has influenced the evolution of the human genome and how the mobility of LINE-1 elements can occasionally lead to genetic diseases such as Hemophilia A, colon cancer and muscular dystrophy.