Genetic Epidemiology
Gene Expression Analysis
Statistical Genetics: other
|
Genetic Epidemiology
The mapping of complex traits of human disorders is one of the most important and central areas of human genetics today. The past two decades have witnessed important advances in molecular, computational and statistical technologies, which have led to the use of large numbers of markers in many current studies. During this exciting time, novel statistical designs, linkage and association methods have been developed for identifying important genes that are responsible for a number of inherited human disorders. However, these successes have been largely restricted to simple and rare Mendelian diseases. For more common and complex human disorders, the promise of similar statistical methods uncovering the mystery of complex traits has yet to be fulfilled. The long-term objective of our research in this domain is to develop a novel and realistic approach to tackle those challenging problems that biomedical researchers are facing today. To achieve this objective, we have the following research directions.
I: methods and theory development. we conduct research on statistical and computational methods that address the new important problems that arose in the mapping of complex traits , theoretical properties of which are to be thoroughly studied. Our main research direction is information-driven marker screening algorithms, which have two main stages: (1) selecting a subset of markers that contain important susceptibility information regarding the traits under study and (2) carrying out a detailed analysis and networks construction on the selected markers, by clustering markers through evaluation of the interactive effects from the markers on the traits of interest.
II: implementations to other designs and data types. we are currently explore and develop extensions that accommodate studies under a variety of study designs and data forms.
III: software implementation and distribution. To develop user-friendly computational packages and tools based on the algorithms proposed, which provide convenient usage of our methods in current and future genetic mapping of complex diseases.
|
