Guoyan Zhao, PhD

Associate Professor with Tenure

Department of Genetics, WashU Medicine

Talk Title: A Unified Framework for Elucidating Molecular Mechanisms of Disease and Evolution

Abstract: Through comparative single-cell genomics data analysis, we identified convergent molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration across diseases, brain regions, and species in astrocytes, microglia, and neurons. We developed a unified framework for the accurate identification of cis-regulatory sequences across vertebrate genomes and demonstrated its power in detecting evolutionarily non-conserved enhancers, annotating regulatory sequences in non-model organisms, and uncovering disease-causal variants and their underlying regulatory mechanisms.

Host: Dr. Susan Dutcher