Project description:The Kashmiri population is an ethno-linguistic group that resides in the Kashmir Valley in northern India. A longstanding hypothesis is that this population derives ancestry from Jewish and/or Greek sources. There is historical and archaeological evidence of ancient Greek presence in India and Kashmir. Further, some historical accounts suggest ancient Hebrew ancestry as well. To date, it has not been determined whether signatures of Greek or Jewish admixture can be detected in the Kashmiri population. Using genome-wide genotyping and admixture detection methods, we determined there are no significant or substantial signs of Greek or Jewish admixture in modern-day Kashmiris. The ancestry of Kashmiri Tibetans was also determined, which showed signs of admixture with populations from northern India and west Eurasia. These results contribute to our understanding of the existing population structure in northern India and its surrounding geographical areas.
Project description:Understanding the impact of DNA methylation within different disease contexts often requires accurate assessment of these modifications in a genome-wide fashion. Frequently, patient-derived tissue stored in long-term hospital tissue banks have been preserved using formalin-fixation paraffin-embedding (FFPE). While these samples can comprise valuable resources for studying disease, the fixation process ultimately compromises the DNA’s integrity and leads to degradation. Degraded DNA can complicate CpG methylome profiling using traditional techniques, particularly when performing methylation sensitive restriction enzyme sequencing (MRE-seq), yielding high backgrounds and resulting in lowered library complexity. Here, we provide results using our new MRE-seq protocol (Capture MRE-seq), tailored to preserving unmethylated CpG information when using samples with highly degraded DNA. The results using Capture MRE-seq correlate well (0.92) with traditional MRE-seq calls when profiling non-degraded samples, and can recover unmethylated regions in highly degraded samples when traditional MRE-seq fails, which we validate using bisulfite sequencing-based data (WGBS) as well as methylated DNA immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (MeDIP-seq).
Project description:The paper "Metabolomic Machine Learning Predictor for Diagnosis and Prognosis of Gastric Cancer" addresses the need for non-invasive diagnostic tools for gastric cancer (GC). Traditional methods like endoscopy are invasive and expensive. The authors conducted a targeted metabolomics analysis of 702 plasma samples to develop machine learning models for GC diagnosis and prognosis. The diagnostic model, using 10 metabolites, achieved a sensitivity of 0.905, outperforming conventional protein marker-based methods. The prognostic model effectively stratified patients into risk groups, surpassing traditional clinical models.
I have successfully reproduced the diagnosis model from the paper. This machine learning-based system differentiates GC patients from non-GC controls using metabolomics data from plasma samples analyzed by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). The model focuses on 10 metabolites, including succinate, uridine, lactate, and serotonin. Employing LASSO regression and a random forest classifier, the model achieved an AUROC of 0.967, with a sensitivity of 0.854 and specificity of 0.926. This model significantly outperforms traditional diagnostic methods and underscores the potential of integrating machine learning with metabolomics for early GC detection and treatment.