Project description:Sensitive and specific detection of the boxwood blight pathogen Calonectria pseudonaviculata with a metagenomic sequencing approach
Project description:Genome-wide association studies implicate multiple loci in risk for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), but few contain exonic variants, rendering systematic identification of non-coding variants essential to decoding SLE genetics. We utilized SNP-seq and bioinformatic enrichment to interrogate 2180 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from 87 SLE risk loci for potential binding of transcription factors and related proteins from B cells. 52 SNPs that passed initial screening were tested by electrophoretic mobility shift (EMSA) and luciferase reporter assays. To identify binding of transcription factors and/or other nuclear proteins in an allele-determined manner, we employed pulldown using nuclear extract from Daudi cells and silver staining in SNPs that had exhibited allele-specific differential binding by EMSA. Each pulldown product for each allele of the five high-probability SNPs (rs2297550 C/G, rs13213604 C/G, rs276461 T/C, rs9907955 C/T, rs7302634 T/C) was evaluated by mass spectrometry (MS) to identify binding nuclear proteins, yielding a set of candidate proteins for each.
Project description:Most of the millions of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the human genome are non-coding, and many overlap with putative regulatory elements. Genome-wide association studies have linked many of these SNPs to human traits or to gene expression levels, but rarely with sufficient resolution to identify the causal SNPs. Functional screens based on reporter assays have previously been of insufficient throughput to test the vast space of SNPs for possible effects on enhancer and promoter activity. Here, we have leveraged the throughput of the SuRE reporter technology to survey a total of 5.9 million SNPs, including 57% of the known common SNPs world-wide. We identified more than 30 thousand SNPs that alter the activity of putative regulatory elements, often in a cell-type specific manner. These data indicate that a large proportion of human non-coding SNPs may affect gene regulation. Integration of these SuRE data with genome-wide association studies may help to identify causal SNPs.
Project description:Global control of the tuberculosis (TB) epidemic is seriously threatened by increasing prevalence of drug resistant (DR) M. tuberculosis (MTB) isolates. Many genome-wide studies have identified DR-associated SNPs and investigated their role in DR mechanisms. However, DR in ~30% of isolates has no clear genetic basis. DR mechanisms related to variation in gene/protein expression are known, but not well-studied.
Project description:Late blight, caused by the oomycete Phytophthora infestans, is one of the most damaging potato diseases. Genetic resistance is one of the most effective means to control the destruction caused by this pathogen. Transgenic potato lines harboring a resistance gene, RB, confer broad-spectrum, rate-reducing late blight resistance. A microarray approach was used to understand what genes are manipulated in the potato background after the addition of the RB gene that contribute to the late blight resistant phenotype. Keywords: Time course, disease state analysis
Project description:Tacrolimus (TAC) is an immunosuppressant widely used in kidney transplantation. TAC displays considerable inter-individual variability in pharmacokinetics (PK). Genetic and clinical factors play important roles in TAC PK. To define genetic factors associated with tacrolimus blood trough concentration, we performed a genome-wide association study of renal transplant samples from 251 Chinese renal transplant recipients. We identified 23 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) related to TAC PK variability. All 23 genome-wide significant SNPs (p<5E-8) were located on chromosome 7, including rs776746. These findings suggest that these SNPs may be associated with the unexlained TAC PK variability in renal transplant recipients and require further investigation.
Project description:We carried out an RNA-seq based transcriptome study on two rice varieties, Cocodrie (CCDR; rice sheath blight susceptible) and MCR10277 (MCR; rice sheath blight resistant), to profile the time-series wide genome-scale transcriptional differences in response to sheath blight (SB), an infection caused by R. solanii (LR172) . Our approach is cross-referencing differentially expressed genes with significant variants of two phenotypically different varieties to validate known and discover novel variants and to further understand rice's physiological response to SB.
