Welcome to the Department of Genetics

Congratulations!

• Daniel Pomp has won the 2012 Governor's Bioscience award from the Bio Nebraska Life Sciences Association for the founding of GeneSeek, along with a business partner, Abraham Oommen. GeneSeek is a leading provider of DNA-based testing to the livestock industries.
• Jim Evans is Principal Investigator of a new four-year grant to fund a project named the North Carolina Clinical Genomic Evaluation by NextGen Exome Sequencing (NCGENES). Other faculty members in the Department of Genetics who are Investigators on this grant are Jonathan Berg, Kirk Wilhelmsen, and Karen Weck.  Jim and Jonathan have also published a recent commentary in JAMA in which they discuss the potential benefits and challenges of the use of whole-genome or whole-exome sequencing in a clinical setting.
• Will Valdar has received a Junior Faculty Development Award from UNC in support of his research for the coming year. These awards are given by the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost to support young faculty members in furthering their research.

News

• The Collaborative Cross has been highlighted by the publication of seven research articles each, plus an introductory Perspective, in the February issues of Genetics and G3 (Genes, Genomes/Genetics). The project is led by Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena in the UNC Department of Genetics, David Threadgill at North Carolina State University, and Gary Churchill at The Jackson Laboratory. Fernando is lead author on the paper featured on the cover of Genetics, co-author on four of the other papers, and "curator" of the mouse strains, which are housed at UNC. The collaborations that led to these publications included over 125 scientists world-wide. Will Valdar and Pat Sullivan are each senior author on one of the articles. Other Department of Genetics faculty collaborators are Mark Heise, Terry Magnuson, Chuck Perou, Daniel Pomp, Ned Sharpless, and Wei Sun, along with numerous postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and technicians from each of the faculty groups. Additional UNC authors are from the Departments of Biostatistics, Computer Science, Epidemiology, Cell and Developmental Biology, and Psychiatry, as well as the Schools of Dentistry and Pharmacy.  All of the collaborators are shown in the photographs from the cover of Genetics. This work was featured in an article in the News and Observer and in a story broadcast on National Public Radio.
• Pat Sullivan and his son, Brendan Bulik-Sullivan, who is a student at the University of California, Berkeley, coauthored a Letter to the Editor of Nature Genetics in which they presented a network graph of the authors of GWAS (Genome-Wide Association Studies) published between 2005 and 2008. Their colorful figure made the cover of the February issue of the journal. Pat also authored a "Between Bedside and Bench" opinion piece in the February issue of Nature Medicine, in which he points out that schizophrenia is a highly polygenic disorder and argues that it is likely to be an example of a "pathway disease."

• Ethan Lange is one of the lead authors of an article in the New England Journal of Medicine reporting on the identification of mutations in the HOXB13 gene in a subset of patients with prostate cancer. This is the first gene to be recognized as one in which mutations result in a highly elevated risk (~20 times higher than the general population) of this common type of cancer.

Events

• Genetics Research Colloquia - Wednesdays @ Noon, Lineberger Cancer Center, Pagano (i.e., Plaza Level) Conference Room
• GMB Friday Seminar Series (guest speakers) - Fridays at noon, G202 MBRB
• Carolina Center for Genome Sciences Seminar Series