QCB Faculty Candidate Special Seminar | Michael Edge, Ph.D.

Michael Edge, Ph.D. 
Post-Doc, University of California, Davis, Dept. of Evolution and Ecology
Research Website

From polygenic adaptation to forensics: The power of aggregating population-genomic information

Thursday, January 31, 2019
2 PM
RRI 101

Abstract: Large genomic datasets provide raw material for answering questions across fields. In many cases, information is scattered across the genome in the form of subtle population-genetic signals, and the key to the problem is finding a way to reassemble these signals. I will present examples that address questions in the study of complex traits and in forensics. First, I will present a novel framework for studying the evolutionary history of complex traits that uses genome-wide association study (GWAS) information to weight evolutionary signals. Next, I will show a record-linkage framework that uses linkage disequilibrium to identify SNP genotypes that come from the same person as non-overlapping forensic genetic genotypes, which speaks to issues of genetic privacy and backward compatibility that are central in forensic genetics. Together, these applications suggest ways in which population-genetic thinking can be used to decode modern genetic datasets.

Host: Carly Kenkel