The Midwest Chinese American Science and Technology Association annual symposium is will be held the weekend of September 14 at the Clayton Plaza Hotel. Dr. Rich Head, Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine and...
James Allen, Ph.D., a graduate student in the Johnson Lab and the Skeath Lab, recently had a paper published in Genetics. The paper, “Maintenance of Melanocyte Stem Cell Quiescence by GABA-A Signaling in Larval Zebrafish,” includes senior authors James B....
Tychele Turner, Ph.D., an incoming Assistant Professor of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, recently got NIH funding for her project, “Nature and contribution of noncoding, regulatory mutations in neurodevelopmental...
The Milbrandt and DiAntonio Labs published a paper recently in Science, “TIR domains of plant immune receptors are NAD+-cleaving enzymes that promote cell death.” Kow Essuman, Ph.D., a graduate student in the Milbrandt Lab, is a lead author on the paper....
The Province Lab and an international team of researchers won a five-year, $68 million NIH grant to study the genetic basis of exceptional human longevity. Principal investigator Michael Province, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Genetics at Washington University...
Nathan Kopp, PhD, a graduate student in the Dougherty Lab at Washington University School of Medicine, recently had a paper published in Human Molecular Genetics. The paper, “Gtf2i and Gtf2ird1 mutation do not account for the full phenotypic effect of the...
The Mitra Lab recently welcomed new lab members. India Reiss joined the lab as graduate student, Josh Langmade joined the lab as a staff scientist, and Jess Cohn joined the lab as a postdoctoral research associate. Welcome to all!
Christian Shively, Ph.D., a postdoc in the Mitra Lab, recently had a paper published in PNAS. The paper, “Homotypic cooperativity and collective binding are determinants of bHLH specificity and function,” appears in a July 24, 2019 issue of the journal....
Joe Dougherty, Ph.D, Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine, is an author on a recently published paper, “A single-nuclei RNA sequencing study of Mendelian and sporadic AD in the human brain.” The...
Mike White, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Genetics in the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, recently co-edited the June/July issue of Current Opinion in Psychology, a review issue focused on genetics and mental health....
The Lawson Lab has a new pre-print, “Natural brown adipose expansion and remission of hyperglycemia in obese SM/J mice.” Caryn Carson and Mario Miranda, graduate students in the Lawson Lab, are first authors on the pre-print. Heather Lawson, Ph.D.,...
Rachel Rahn, a graduate student in the Dougherty Lab, got an F31 for her project, Functional Connectivity across Development in a Mouse Model of Rett Syndrome. Congratulations, Rachel!
Dr. Susan K. Dutcher, Professor of Genetics and of Cell Biology and Physiology, has been awarded a MIRA (Maximizing Investigators Research Award) from NIGMS for five years. Congratulations, Dr. Dutcher!
Dr. Emily Hunter has joined the Dutcher Lab as a postdoctoral fellow. Dr. Hunter did her graduate work at Emory University. She was awarded a W.M. Keck Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Molecular Medicine. Welcome, Dr. Hunter!
The Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Department of Developmental Biology recently hosted Microscopy Day at the Urban Girls Institute of the Sophia Project. The event was organized by Jim Skeath, Ph.D., Professor...
“Development at the Single Cell Level,” a recent special issue from Development journal, features a spotlight piece from the Morris Lab on shifting definitions of cell fate in the single cell era. Congratulations, all!
The Morris Lab and Humphreys Lab’s recent paper on single cell seq of kidney organoids was featured in the “Best of Cell Stem Cell 2018.” Congratulations, all!
Jeffrey Milbrandt, M.D., Ph.D., the James S. McDonnell Professor of Genetics and head of the Department of Genetics, and Aaron DiAntonio, M.D., Ph.D., the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Professor of Developmental Biology, will co-lead the new Needleman Center for...
Darshan Sapkota, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Dougherty Lab, got funding for his K99 application. With this grant, Darshan will study the role of a new variant of Aquaporin 4 protein in brain function and Alzheimer’s disease. Aquaporin 4 is a water...
Samantha Morris, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Developmental Biology and Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the university including Ben Humphreys, M.D., Ph.D., Bo Zhang, P.hD., and...
The Dougherty Lab published a paper recently in Genes, Brain and Behavior. The paper, “Celf6 RNA binding protein impairs cocaine conditioned place preference and contextual fear conditioning,” shows that the resistance to change by the Celf6 mutant in the...
Josh Jang, a graduate student in the Wang Lab, and Nakul Shah, a medical student in the Wang Lab, had their paper selected as one of the Papers of the Month by Environmental Factor from NIEHS. The paper, “Transposable elements contribute to tumor growth,”...
The Dougherty Lab published a paper recently in Autism Research, “Erroneous inference based on a lack of preference within one group: Autism, mice, and the social approach task.” The paper looks at Erroneous Within‐group Only Comparisons, or EWOCs, a term...
Gary Stormo, Ph.D., the Joseph Erlanger Professor in the Department of Genetics and the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at the School of Medicine, will receive the Carl and Gerty Cori Faculty Achievement Award in 2019. Dr. Stormo will receive his award...
The Dougherty Lab was recently awarded a pilot grant from the Center for Clinical Pharmacology for its project, “A new model to understand the developmental deficits associated with fetal exposure to opioids.” Principal Investigators are Ream Al-Hasani,...
The Dutcher Lab is working with an interdisciplinary team of researchers to develop a new method that uses ultrasound waves to trap cells propelled by cilia, and then releases them to measure their movement as they swim away. Susan Dutcher, professor of genetics and...
The Wang Lab published a new paper in Nucleic Acids Research, “WashU Epigenome Browser update 2019.” The paper discusses new features of the WashU Epigenome Browser including visualization using virtual reality, expanded public data hubs, and a a feature...
Kayla Nygaard, a graduate student in the Dougherty Lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, recently had a paper accepted for publication. The paper, “Erroneous inference based on a lack of preference within one group: autism, mice, and the...
The Wang Lab recently published a paper in Nature Communications. The paper, “Epigenetic dysregulation of enhancers in neurons is associated with Alzheimer’s disease pathology and cognitive symptoms,” shows that “AD neurons have a large cluster of...
The Morris Lab published a paper recently in Genome Biology. The paper, “CellTag Indexing: genetic barcode-based sample multiplexing for single-cell genomics,” presents “CellTag Indexing as a broadly applicable genetic multiplexing tool that is...
Kow Essuman, a graduate student in the Milbrandt Lab, recently defended his thesis recently at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Kow’s talk, “The Enzymatic Function of the TIR domain: From Axon Degeneration to Innate Immunity,”...
Tomás Lagunas Jr, a graduate student in the Dougherty Lab, was invited to speak at Brown University for the inaugural Dr. Samuel M. Nabrit Conference for Early Career Scholars. Congratulations, Tomás! Read more about Tomás and his work in the Dougherty...
A recent paper from the Wang Lab, “Transposable elements drive widespread expression of oncogenes in human cancers,” was recommended in F1000Prime as being of special significance in its field by F1000 Faculty Member Michael Zhang, Cecil H. and Ida Green...
The Wang Lab had a recent paper accepted by Nucleic Acids Research. The paper, “FeatSNP: An Interactive Database for Brain-Specific Epigenetic Annotation of Human SNPs,” discusses FeatSNP, an online tool and curated database for exploring 81 million common...
The Morris Lab has a new preprint, “Single-Cell Analysis Reveals Regional Reprogramming during Adaptation to Massive Small Bowel Resection in Mice.” The study, which was carried out in collaboration with the Warner Lab at Washington University School of...
William Buchser, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and Cell Microsystems, a Research Triangle Park, NC-based biotech company, recently got an NIH grant to develop pooled CRISPR-mediated...
The Schedl Lab recently published an article in Development journal. The article, “Rapid, population-wide declines in stem cell number and activity during reproductive aging in C. elegans,” shows that while sporadic defects explain the sterility of some...
The Dougherty Lab has a new preprint, “A single-nuclei RNA sequencing study of Mendelian and sporadic AD in the human brain.” The preprint proposes a collection of best practices to generate a highly-detailed molecular cell atlas of highly informative...
Ting Wang, Ph.D., The Sanford and Karen Loewentheil Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, recently published a paper in Frontiers in Genetics. The paper, “FeatSNP: An Interactive Database for Brain-Specific...
Celine St. Pierre, a graduate student in the Lawson Lab, recently received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her project, “Unraveling how parent-of-origin effects contribute to complex traits.” Congratulations, Celine!
Alex Miranda, a graduate student in the Lawson Lab, was recently inducted into the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society. The society recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement and promotes diversity and excellence in graduate education. Congratulations, Alex!
Susan Dutcher, Ph.D., Professor of Genetics and Cell Biology & Physiology at Washington University School of Medicine, and Samantha A. Morris, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Developmental Biology and Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine, were...
Max Staller, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Cohen Lab, is the first awardee of the annual Outstanding Postdoc Mentor or Teacher Award. Congratulations, Dr. Staller! Read more about Dr. Staller’s work in the Cohen Lab.
A new study from the Wang Lab at Washington University School of Medicine heavily implicates a genetic phenomenon known as “jumping genes” in the growth of tumors. The study, published March 29 in Nature Genetics, opens the door for new research for future...
The Wang lab published an article recently in Nature Genetics. The article, “Transposable elements drive widespread expression of oncogenes in human cancers,” discusses results that “characterize the global profile of (transposable element)...
The first Medical Genetics Awareness Week kicks off on April 2, 2019 with the theme “Celebrating the Contributions of the Entire Medical Genetics Team to Patient Care.” Through this event, the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) “aims...
Nancy Saccone, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics at Washington University in St. Louis, recently got an NIH award for her project, “Cannabis Use and its Medical Risks and Benefits: Leveraging Mobile Technology and Consumer Genomics.”...
The Morris Lab has updated their preprint on CellTag-based multiplexing. In the updated preprint, the lab now shows the advantage of a “living label” for tracking cells in an in vivo competitive transplant setting. Lab members found that their transplanted...
Mathieu Bottier, a postdoctoral fellow in the Dutcher Lab, recently had a paper published in Biophysical Journal. The paper, “How Does Cilium Length Affect Beating?” shows that features of the ciliary waveform were quantified from polynomial curves fitted...
The Lawson Lab recently had a preprint published. The preprint, “Epistatic Networks Associated with Parent-of-Origin Effects on Metabolic Traits,” presents genes and networks that represent a set of actionable interacting candidates that can be probed to...
Kow Essuman, a graduate student in the Milbrandt Lab, is one of two winners of the 2019 O’Leary Prize. Yesterday Kow gave a short presentation of his research at the O’Leary Prize Competition on the Medical Campus, which was enough to convince the judges that he...
Susan Maloney, Ph.D., Instructor in Psychiatry and a member of the Dougherty Lab, recently had a first-author paper published in Scientific Reports. The paper, “Repeated neonatal isoflurane exposures in the mouse induce apoptotic degenerative changes in the...
The Dougherty Lab has a new preprint, “Gtf2i and Gtf2ird1 mutation are not sufficient to reproduce mouse phenotypes caused by the Williams Syndrome critical region.” In the paper, first author Nathan Kopp, graduate student in the Dougherty Lab, disproves a...
Kow Essuman, a graduate student in the Milbrandt Lab, and Alex Russo, a graduate student in the DiAntonio Lab, are finalists for the O’Leary Prize. As finalists, Kow and Alex will give short presentations of their research at the O’Leary Prize Competition on...
The Calling Cards team in the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis had their preprint on self-reporting transposons selected for a prelight. The prelight contains additional insights about the paper from Arnav Moudgil, a...
The Lawson Lab recently had a paper published in Nutrition & Metabolism. The paper, “Dietary iron interacts with genetic background to influence glucose homeostasis,” shows the importance of accounting for genetic variation when assessing the effects...
Jeff Milbrandt, M.D., Ph.D., James S. McDonnell Professor and head of the Department of Genetics, is helping usher in a new era at the McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Milbrandt, who was recently appointed executive...
Samantha Morris, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Developmental Biology and Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and Susan Dutcher, Ph.D., Professor of Genetics and Cell Biology and Physiology at Washington University School of Medicine in...
Tomás Lagunas Jr., a graduate student in the Dougherty Lab in the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, was recently named a fellow of the Yale Ciencia Academy for Career Development. The program gives graduate...
The Dougherty Lab recently had a paper published in Cell Reports. The paper, “Cell-Type-Specific Profiling of Alternative Translation Identifies Regulated Protein Isoform Variation in the Mouse Brain,” shows that alternative translation is widespread and...
Joe Willis, a lab assistant in the Department of Genetics, is recovering well after a car accident in January. Joe is in Room 316 of St. Mary’s Rehabilitation Hospital. Please stop by and visit, or send your best wishes for a speedy recovery: St. Mary’s...
The Mitra lab has a new preprint, “Self-reporting transposons enable simultaneous readout of gene expression and transcription factor binding in single cells.” The first author on the paper is Arnav Moudgil, a graduate student in Dr. Rob Mitra’s lab....
Max Staller, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Cohen Lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, got a K99 career award from National Institutes of Health. His project, “High-Throughput Functional Interrogation of Mammalian Activation...
Zach Pincus, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine, received his first R01 grant from National Institutes of Health. His project, “Discover Determinants of Individual Lifespan and Health,” will...
The Dougherty lab recently shared its new preprint, “Erroneous inference based on a lack of preference within one group: autism, mice, and the Social Approach Task.” In the paper, the lab argues using statistical principles and data simulations that...
Sheng Chih (Peter) Jin, Ph.D., will join the Department of Genetics as Assistant Professor in August 2019. Peter’s research will focus on the genetics of congenital heart disease and neurodevelopmental disorders. Peter is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at...
The Milbrandt and DiAntonio labs had a paper published recently on gene therapy that blocks peripheral damage in mice. The paper, “Gene therapy targeting SARM1 blocks pathological axon degeneration in mice,” appears in a recent issue of the Journal of...
Ting Wang, Ph.D., was installed yesterday as the Sanford C. and Karen P. Loewentheil Distinguished Professorship in the School of Medicine in an afternoon ceremony. Mark S. Wrighton, Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, David H. Perlmutter, M.D., George...
Darshan Sapkota, a postdoctoral researcher in the Dougherty lab, had a paper published recently on non-canonical translational events in CNS cell types in vitro and in vivo. The paper, “Cell-Type-Specific Profiling of Alternative Translation Identifies Regulated...
Nathan Kopp, a graduate student in the lab of Joe Dougherty, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics, recently was accepted to a dual clinical genetic counseling/postdoc position at UCLA. Congratulations, Nathan! Read more about Nathan and his work in...
We are pleased to announce that Tychele Turner, Ph.D., will join the faculty at Washington University Department of Genetics as an Assistant Professor of Genetics in Fall 2019. Tychele is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the laboratory of Evan Eichler at the...
Kow Essuman, a graduate student in Dr. Jeff Milbrandt’s lab in The Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine, was recently named a Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Medical Science Fellow. The Olin award recognizes outstanding achievement in...
The Dougherty lab had a paper published recently in eNeuro. The paper, “The differences in local translatome across distinct neuron types is mediated by both baseline cellular differences and post-transcriptional mechanisms,” suggests that differences in...
The Morris lab had a spotlight published recently in Developmental Cell. The spotlight is on Barbara Treutlein’s and Elly Tanaka’s recent single-cell analysis of axolotl regeneration. Guillermo Rivera-Gonzalez, Ph.D., a postdoc in the Morris lab, is first...
The Wang lab has a preprint on bioRxiv. The study, “Co-opted transposons help perpetuate conserved higher-order chromosomal structures,” shows that transposable elements (TEs) contribute regulatory plasticity that helps maintain conserved genome...
The Morris lab published a paper recently in Nature. The paper, “Single-cell mapping of lineage and identity in direct reprogramming,” shows that expression of a putative methyltransferase, Mettl7a1, is associated with the successful reprogramming...
Celine St. Pierre, a graduate student in the Lawson lab in the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is an author on a paper recently published in Nature Communications. The study, “Genome wide association analysis in a...
We’re thankful for our students! Last night Dr. Jim Skeath hosted the 18th Annual Genetics, Dev. Bio, Comp Bio PhD Programs and First Year DBBS Thanksgiving Dinner. By the looks of it, it was a hit!
The Cohen lab published a paper recently in Nature Biotechnology. The paper, “A massively parallel reporter assay dissects the influence of chromatin structure on cis-regulatory activity,” presents methods that can help investigators determine when...
Congratulations to Dr. Jim Skeath, Professor of Genetics, and students in the MARC U-STAR program at Washington University in St. Louis who attended the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) in Indianapolis, Indiana last weekend. Tahj...
Samantha Morris, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Developmental Biology and Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, collaborated with the Humphreys lab on a recently published paper. The paper, “Comparative Analysis and Refinement of...
Ting Wang, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and his lab recently had a paper published in Biometrics. The paper, “A non‐randomized procedure for large‐scale heterogeneous multiple...
The Wang lab and the Dougherty lab had a paper published recently in Cell Reports. The paper, “Characterization of a Mouse Model of Börjeson-Forssman-Lehmann Syndrome,” shows that PHF6-regulated genes are overrepresented in gene signatures and modules that...
Claire Weichselbaum, a graduate student in Dr. Joseph Dougherty’s lab, was recently featured in a segment on NPR’s St. Louis Public Radio. The on-air piece spotlighted “Brain Discovery,” a program that Weichselbaum co-founded with Brian...
Congratulations to graduate students Celine St. Pierre, Nicolette Laird, and Gervette Penny for winning “Best Poster” awards at the recent DBBS retreat. Celine, a member of the Lawson lab, won for the Human and Statistical Genomics program (HSG); Nicolette Laird, a...
Congratulations to graduate students Lei Chen, Dylan Lawrence, and Jared Goodman for winning “Best Talk” awards at the recent DBBS retreat. Lei, a member of the Hall lab, won for the Human and Statistical Genomics program (HSG); Dylan, a member of the...
The Lawson lab recently had two papers accepted for publication. The first, “The Epigenetics of Metabolic Syndrome,” by first author Caryn Carson, a graduate student in the Lawson lab, will appear in an upcoming issue of Physiological Genomics 2018. The...
The Dutcher lab is on a roll with publications. The lab has a paper, “RPGRIP1L helps to establish the ciliary gate for entry of proteins,” that will appear in an upcoming issue of Journal of Cell Science. Congratulations, all!
The Dutcher lab collaborated with Paul Cliften, Ph.D., Director of Computational Biology at the Genome Technology Access Center (GTAC) at Washington University School of Medicine, on a recent paper. The paper, “MAPINS, a highly efficient detection method that...
Gervette Penny, a graduate student in the Dutcher lab, received a poster award for her poster at the MGG, CSB, and HSG retreat in September. Congratulations, Gervette!
Ting Wang, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics, is a co-corresponding author on a paper published recently. The paper, “The 3D Genome Browser: a web-based browser for visualizing 3D genome organization and long-range chromatin...
The Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences (DBBS) recently held its annual retreat for its Molecular Genetics and Genomics (MGG), Computational and Systems Biology (CSB), and Human and Statistical Genetics (HSG) programs. Faculty members honored program...
Dr. Jeff Milbrandt, M.D., Ph.D., the James S. McDonnell Professor of Genetics and the head of the Department of Genetics, contributed to a paper that was published recently in PNAS. The paper, “HSP90 is a chaperone for DLK and is required for axon injury...
Joseph Dougherty, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics, recently got a three-year award from the Simons Foundation for his project, “4/4 SSC ASC Whole Genome Sequencing Consortium: UTR mutation analysis.” Congratulations, Dr....
Zach Pincus, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics, recently got NIH funding for his project, “Discover Determinants of Individual Lifespan and Health.” Congratulations, Dr. Pincus! Read more about Dr. Pincus and his research...
Ting Wang, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics, recently got NIH funding for his project, “Decoding the Impact of Transposable Elements on Gene Regulation.” The project will be funded through June 2002. Congratulations, Dr. Wang! Read...
Denis Avey, Ph.D., a postdoc in the Mitra and Milbrandt labs, had a paper accepted recently by Cell Reports. The paper, “Single cell RNAseq uncovers a robust transcriptional response to morphine by glia,” looks at the morphine-dependent transcriptional...
The Dutcher lab recently had a paper accepted for publication. The paper, “Highly efficient detection of insertional mutants in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii by MAPINS,” appears in an upcoming issue of Plant Physiology. Dr. Huawen Lin, Dr. Paul Cliften of the...
Daniel W. Summers, Ph.D., a postdoc in Dr. Jeff Milbrandt’s lab, recently had a paper published in PNAS. The paper, “Palmitoylation enables MAPK-dependent proteostasis of axon survival factors,” shows that intracellular location imparts sensitivity...
Dr. Joseph Dougherty and Dr. Robi Mitra were recently awarded an NIH grant. The award for the project, “Parallel Analysis of Transcription and Protein-DNA Interactions in Single CNS Cells,” supports Dougherty and Mitra’s work at Washington University...
