Tychele Turner, PhD

Tychele Turner, PhD

Assistant Professor of Genetics

Turner Lab | Google Scholar Profile | CV


Education

BS in Genomics and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University, 2008

PhD in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 2014

Senior Research Fellow, University of Washington Department of Genome Sciences, 2014-2019

Research Interests

My research focus is on the discovery and characterization of genetic etiological factors involved in neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs). Most of my work has applied genetic and functional approaches to understand autism with a focus on de novo and rare inherited variants, the potential underpinnings of the sex bias, birth order effects, and clustering of disease mutations in the primary protein structure. While there has been considerable progress in our understanding of the genetics of NDDs through the use of exome and array technologies there still remains an appreciable gap in understanding of their genetic architecture. Therefore, one major area of recent focus is variation in the noncoding genome. Main areas of work in the lab include assessment of whole-exome sequencing and whole-genome sequencing data in families with neurodevelopmental disorders, variant prioritization using functional genomic data, massively parallel reporter assays, and other functional experiments assessing consequences of variation.

Latest News

Tychele Turner, PhD

Study examines overlap in causes of cancer, neurodevelopmental disorders (Links to an external site)

A new research, led by Genetics Assistant Professor, Tychele Turner, used the Google DeepMind tool AlphaFold and their own newly developed computational tools to model the disease-causing changes to proteins in almost 40,000 families with neurodevelopmental disorders and in more than 10,000 sequenced tumors representing five cancer types. This research was recently published in the journal Cell Genomics.