The photo is by yours truly during my fieldwork in Turkey.
Blog
New review: Archaic hominin introgression into modern human genomes
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
New paper: Human and Non-Human Primate Lineage-Specific Footprints in the Salivary Proteome
A very nice study of the proteins in our saliva as compared to our primate cousins came out @MBE - The study is led by our long time collaborator Stefan Ruhl's group. Our results are in line with the general ideas presented in 70's in King and Wilson's classic paper where the dosage differences in… Continue reading New paper: Human and Non-Human Primate Lineage-Specific Footprints in the Salivary Proteome
New review: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Impact of Genomic Copy Number Variation on Human Health
A new review paper by the mighty @marie_saitou on the difficulties and promises in integrating evolutionary framework and investigation of genomic structural variants. We talk a lot about how structural variants of different types likely affect function and have evolutionary impact on human phenotypic variation. But, we keep missing these signatures because: 1. They are… Continue reading New review: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Impact of Genomic Copy Number Variation on Human Health
Webinar (and a new logo): A new era in human evolutionary history research
Folks at RSG-Turkey invited me to give a talk about Evolutionary/Population Genomics - I talked about recent work in our laboratory - of course with a focus on structural variants. 🙂 Also - the new logo thanks to @MarieSaitou https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TrES_f19hs
New Paper: A new method to investigate the haplotype context of duplicated genes
We have reported a computational method to detect the haplotypes harboring polymorphic gene duplications in the human genome variation dataset. This study is now published in Genome Biology and Evolution. The maestro (is it maestra?), herself drew an amazing image to accompany the piece (hopefully the next cover of the journal?). Polymorphic duplications can be… Continue reading New Paper: A new method to investigate the haplotype context of duplicated genes
New paper: Independent amylase gene duplications
Stefan (Ruhl) and I recently published a comprehensive survey of the amylase gene copy number and salivary enzyme activity among mammalian species eLife. Petar (Pajic) was the driving force for the sample collection and analysis. Briefly, we found that 1. Amylase copy number evolves extremely fast leading to independent (I daresay convergent) bursts among mammals… Continue reading New paper: Independent amylase gene duplications
New paper: Hotspots of structural variation
Onta (Yen Lung Lin) led the charge in this careful characterization of regions in the genome where that lead to the recurrent formation of structural variation. The paper "Fine-scale characterization of genomic structural variation in the human genome reveals adaptive and biomedically relevant hotspots" is now published in GBE. This paper has given us some… Continue reading New paper: Hotspots of structural variation
New Paper: An incomplete sweep of a metabolizing gene
A whole gene deletion sounds awful! You lose one entire gene and hence the protein that this gene is coding. However, there exist several gene deletions which have been maintained polymorphically among human populations. In our previous work, we found that a cellular detoxification gene, the GSTM1, to remain polymorphically deleted in both humans and… Continue reading New Paper: An incomplete sweep of a metabolizing gene
New paper: Evolutionary biology of cellular aging (We got the cover)
An evolutionary transcriptomics approach links CD36 to membrane remodeling in replicative senescence Press release by Charlotte Hsu Academic minute podcast by our collaborator Ekin Atilla The evolution of cellular senescence is a remarkable question. It connects to development, organismal life-span, protection against cancer, and its rate seems to vary between species. Moreover, since life-span of… Continue reading New paper: Evolutionary biology of cellular aging (We got the cover)
Buffalo Evolutionary and Anthropological Genomics Laboratory (BEAGL) 