Department of Genetics
May 2025
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Department of Genetics 50th Anniversary Celebration and Symposium on April 24, 2025 |
We hope you enjoyed the Department's 50th Anniversary Celebration and Symposium! Thank you to all the speakers, students, faculty and staff who attended the event. Here’s to more amazing years at the Department of Genetics at WashU Medicine! Now you can view a photo gallery of the event and the recorded sessions of the speakers on our website.
Read more on our site »
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Dr. Rob Mitra inducted into the AIMBE College of Fellows |
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AIMBE Fellows represent the top 2% of medical and biological engineers. They include the most accomplished medical and biological engineers in academia, industry, education, clinical practice, and government. Congratulations to Dr. Rob Mitra for being inducted on March 31 in Arlington, Va. along with 169 other new fellows from across the United States.
Read more on our site »
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Dr. Brett Maricque received the 2025 Dean’s Impact Award. |
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Brett Maricque, PhD, co-leads the Black Genome Project, fostering essential conversations with local schools, faith-based organizations and nonprofits to help them understand the impact of genetic research on Black communities in St. Louis. He is building trust with a community that historically has been skeptical of the medical profession and Washington University in St. Louis, due to past challenges in access to quality health care.
Read more »
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Graduate student Nahyun Kong in the Jin lab was invited to present at Yale’s Genetics Clinical Grand Rounds on 4/22/25. Her talk title was "Comprehensive Variant Profiling: Examining Uniparental Disomy, Somatic Variant, & Mitochondrial Variant." Congratulations!
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Congratulations to graduate student Kia Barclay in the Li lab for winning the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Award!
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| Congratulations to graduate student Zefan (Vivien) Li in the Jin lab for receiving a full scholarship to attend the Bruce Weir Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics at Georgia Tech!
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| Congratulations to postdoctoral researcher Turan Tufan in the Wang lab for winning the 2025 Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Fellow Award from WashU!
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- Undergraduate students Leah Sager and Vikram Karra in the Li lab have been selected as SURGE Scholars.
- Meers Lab PhD student Cass Pitts was recognized with an Honorable Mention on her application for the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) from the National Science Foundation (NSF)!
- Congrats to postdoctoral researcher Wesley Saintilnord in the Wang lab for winning the Siteman Travel Award!
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Province lab's Long Life Family Study highlighted in the New York Times |
| The Turner lab celebrated their recent publication in Cell Genomics |
To celebrate the recent publication in Cell Genomics, on which Dr. Tychele Turner is the senior corresponding author, authors from Washington University School of Medicine gathered for dinner at Akar on May 8, 2025. Co-first authors Jeffrey Ng and Titilope Akinwe were among those in attendance and were cheered and congratulated. A heartfelt thanks to everyone for your dedication and collaboration on this meaningful research project.
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Dr. Mike Meers awarded $50,000 Center of Regenerative Medicine Seed Grant |
The grant will help the lab conduct early pilot experiments for a project studying how chromatin landscapes impact transcription factor access to genomic targets across many distinct cell types, with implications for understanding how transcription factors shape developmental cell fate decisions.
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Dr. Guoyan Zhao's collaborative project with Dr. Cyril Pottier for the NGI pilot award was funded
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The project titled "Dissecting genetic and epigenetic signatures associated with cotton and wool plaques in Alzheimer’s Disease" will lay the foundation for future efforts to carry out the proteomics and multiomic profiling of CWP patients to identify new potential therapeutic targets and biomarkers.
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Dr. Joe Dougherty received $300,000 pilot award from the Simons Foundation |
The project titled "A Pilot Platform for Restoring Autism Gene Expression" will explore a platform dedicated to adapting a flexible, modular, class of therapeutics traditionally used to decrease gene expression – AntiSense Oligonucleotides (ASOs) – to instead promote expression by designing ASOs that block negative regulatory elements in non-coding sequences downstream of disease genes, in the 3’ UnTranslated Region (UTR).
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NIH renews funding for ambitious Human Pangenome Reference Sequencing Project |
The Wang lab and MGI continue to serve as the national coordinating center for the entire project and house one of the data production centers performing genomic sequencing. Read news release here
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“Proteome-wide assessment of differential missense variant clustering in neurodevelopmental disorders and cancer” in Cell Genomics, Turner lab
"Undocking of an extensive ciliary network induces proteostasis and cell fate switching resulting in severe primary ciliary dyskinesia" in Science Translational Medicine, Dutcher lab
"Sequencing in over 50,000 cases identifies coding and structural variation underlying atrial fibrillation risk" in Nature Genetics, Dutcher lab as part of the NHLBI Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Consortium
"A statistical framework for multi-trait rare variant analysis in large-scale whole-genome sequencing studies" in Nature Computational Science, Dutcher lab as part of the NHLBI Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Consortium
"Lifespan in rodents with MYT1L heterozygous mutation" in Scientific Reports, Dougherty lab
"Chromosomal and gonadal sex have differing effects on social motivation in mice" in Biology of Sex Differences, Dougherty lab
"Single-cell technology grows up: Leveraging high-resolution omics approaches to understand neurodevelopmental disorders" in Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Dougherty lab
"WashU Epigenome Browser update 2025" in Nucleic Acids Research, Wang lab
"Integrative Molecular and Functional Analysis of Human Sperm Subpopulations to Identify New Biomarkers of Fertilization Potential", in Archives of Medical Research, Wang lab
“Transcriptional and chromatin accessibility landscapes of hematopoiesis in a mouse model of breast cancer” in Journal of Immunology, Wang lab
“Exploring the epigenome profiles of repetitive elements with the WashU Repeat Browser” in Genome Research, Wang lab
“iPSCs and iPSC-derived cells as a model of human genetic and epigenetic variation” in Nature Communications, Wang lab
“methylGrapher: genome-graph-based processing of DNA methylation data from whole genome bisulfite sequencing” in Nucleic Acids Research, Wang lab
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| - Tuesday, May 13, 2025, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
- Connor Auditorium (FLTC)
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Join us at the 27th Annual Donald C. Shreffler Memorial Lecture with Dr. Harmit Malik presenting "Genetic conflicts during meiosis drive the rapid evolution of essential chromatin proteins"
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| - Thursday, May 15, 2025, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
- Connor Auditorium (FLTC)
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This seminar will introduce the new Washington University Scalable Mouse Assay Center, an assay and data generation center for the SSPsyGene Consortium.
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| - Monday, June 09, 2025, 1:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
- Eric P. Newman Education Center (EPNEC)
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The Open Science Day is part of the annual NHGRI Technology Development meeting. There will be a great line-up of speakers talking about the latest developments in functional genomics, and our own Dr. Rob Mitra will be giving the keynote address. Register now to attend the free event!
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The Stormo Fellowship Open for Application |
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The Gary D. Stormo Computational & Systems Biology Fellowship application has started! Check out the application process and eligibility requirements here!
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