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
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
Our lab has been excited by genomic structural variation because we believe that they underlie a considerable and underappreciated part of the phenotypic variation in primates. It is just that they are challenging to study and come up with straightforward evolutionary stories. Most of the time, what we find is much more complicated than we… Continue reading New paper: Structural variants are awesome – And they affect detoxification genes
We have helped Cemali Bekpen and the Max Planck Evolutionary Biology Group of Dr. Tautz in resolving a very complicated and variable gene duplication. Even though, some of the trends remain fuzzy, it is now clear that gene duplications of SPATA31 diversified in humans and remain variable. What is more, some of their function has to do… Continue reading New paper: Of light, duplications and UV protection
Our paper (led by Erica - Yay), a close collaboration with the ever-wise Stefan Ruhl, on the complex evolution of the smaller one of the two salivary mucins, MUC7, is now published - It is open access and here is the link. Our great press office, particularly Charlotte Hsu made a nice summary of the… Continue reading New Paper – Recent evolution of the salivary mucin MUC7
Jelena Tica from Jan Korbel's group led a rigorous method development effort. You can find the full, open access article here
Our efforts to resequence and analyze primate genomes with a focus on genomic structural variation has now been published. Here is the link for the paper and here is the link for the curated datasets. The study, I think, is a major step forward to understand evolution of primate genomes. Now that several papers from Eichler… Continue reading New Paper in PNAS: Primate genome architecture influences structural variation mechanisms and functional consequences
This paper describing a nice evolutionary story about interaction between HIV and the host immune system, is mostly the effort of our collaborators in Mount Sinai. You can find the abstract below and here is the link to the article. APOBEC3G (A3G) is a cytidine deaminase that restricts HIV-1 and other lentiviruses. Most of these… Continue reading New Paper in Journal of Virology: Vif proteins from diverse primate lentiviral lineages use a same binding site in APOBEC3G
I am giving a talk tomorrow at AAPAs that touches on the impact of genomic structural variation on the phenotypic diversity within and between primate species. For more details: Link
Bilim kazanı için İlker ve Aysu ile uzunca bir muhabbet ettik. Tatlı dillerinden ayrılıp da eve dönmem gece yarısı 1'i buldu. Ama galiba ayırdığımız 5 saate değdi. İnsanı insan yapan nedir diye sorduk - Dinlemek için basın buraya. Bu arada iyice yaşlandığımı tasdikleyecek ama, FatBoy Slim'in şu klibini hatırlamadım değil... 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub747pprmJ8
Buffalo Evolutionary and Anthropological Genomics Laboratory (BEAGL) 