Izzy Starr (they/them/their) led this project along with our collaborators Ani Sinha, and Kristina Seiffert to investigate the relationship between recent evolution and immune-mediated trends in human skin. Our major finding is that there are specific genes that are expressed in a human-specific manner in the skin which are also involved in psoriasis. Further, these… Continue reading New paper: Thick-skinned apes
A recent study that is a collaboration between Naoki Masuda, Marie Saitou, and my lab is now online Molecular Biology and Evolution. It is a clever construct by Naoki to collectively analyze the allele frequency distributions of different structural variants across the globe. We identified several interesting candidates, including those that were already on our… Continue reading New paper: Using multiple populations to investigate deviations across geographies – structural variation edition
Our paper on adaptive evolution of a very common, exonic deletion polymorphism is now published in Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abi4476 Our press office did an excellent job as usual - The press release is here: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2021/09/030.html This study is interesting in our opinion for three main reasons: We are showing that the adaptive pressures acting on… Continue reading New paper: Sex- and environment dependent adaptive evolution of a common deletion in human growth hormone receptor
As the pandemic continues to make our lives an unending Stephen King novel, one silver lining was the rise of our global connectivity with the online tools. Despite the fatigue, I think this provided a good rationale for me to compile the videos, interviews, talks, etc. that talk about our work and are publicly available… Continue reading Recordings, interviews, and other films
We have now compiled the most comprehensive gene expression atlas for different salivary gland types in humans. Here is the link for the paper now published in Cell Reports. Here is the news release from our press office. The highlights and the graphical abstract of the publication really summarizes the findings so I am not… Continue reading New paper: Salivary gland biology
Michael Frachetti and I have written a review on some of the current discussion points in application of ancient genomics to archaeological questions. The main thesis, I think, is summarized as follows: "We argue that the broad and seemingly daunting ethical, methodological, and theoretical challenges posed by archaeogenomics, in fact, represent the very cutting edge… Continue reading New Review: The Impact of Ancient Genome Studies in Archaeology
Ozgur Taskent led this elegant study on the history of Neanderthal introgressions into the human gene pool. We added to the growing lines of evidence that our ancestors have met multiple Neanderthal populations, interacted with them, and now we carry little pieces of DNA from our ancient cousins. Our paper also highlights the deletion polymorphisms… Continue reading New paper: Different Neanderthal ancestors
Bir zamandır laboratuarımızda yaptığımız araştırmaları Türkçe özetlemek gibi bir fikrim vardı. Bu işe başlamak için kendi websitesimizin en uygun medya olacağına karar verdim. Amacım geniş bir okuyucu kitlesi tarafından anlaşılabilir bir şekilde hızla değişen ve insanlığın biyolojik temelleri üzerine hiç beklenmedik bulgulara ulaşan alanımı Türkiye'de tanıtmak. Yazılarımı (ve podcast, video, vb. medya linklerini) https://gokcumenlab.org/tag/turkce/ adresinden… Continue reading Türkçe yazılar
The photo is by yours truly during my fieldwork in Turkey.
I wrote a new review paper for the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology. It summarizes some the recent insights from the genomes of archaic humans (e.g., Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc.) within an anthropological framework. Specifically, I tried to answer the following questions: How have genomic data from archaic hominins changed our view of human evolution? Is there any doubt… Continue reading New review: Archaic hominin introgression into modern human genomes
Buffalo Evolutionary and Anthropological Genomics Laboratory (BEAGL) 