Mingyao Li, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine is the Science at the Edge speaker on Friday, January 25 – her abstract follows this message.  I have one slot to fill from 9:45-10:30.  If you are available and would like to meet with Dr. Li, please respond to this message.

Thank you for your time and consideration of this request.

Helen

Mingyao Li

Department of Biostatistics & Epidemiology

University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Translational Genomics Studies in Evoked Human Inflammation

Inappropriate or sustained activation of innate immunity is a pathologic feature of several common cardiometabolic disorders. Little is known, however, about transcriptomic modulation during inflammatory stress in disease relevant human tissues. We applied RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) during low-dose experimental endotoxemia (LPS) in healthy humans to interrogate, in an unbiased manner, inflammatory tissue level transcriptome responses of relevance to complex cardiometabolic diseases. We utilized adipose and blood samples from three healthy individuals who underwent a standardized inpatient endotoxemia protocol. Our comprehensive analysis revealed substantial, highly tissue-specific LPS modulated changes in the expression of protein-coding genes and lincRNAs as well as alternative splicing (AS). We also confirmed adipocytes and macrophages as potential cell sources of selective LPS modulated lincRNAs and AS events. We further defined disease relevance of a subset of findings in obese adipose tissue and through interrogation of overlap with genome-wide association study loci for cardiometabolic traits. Finally, we evaluated the relationship between RNA-Seq depth and the ability to detect differentially expressed (DE) genes and differential AS (DAS) events. Our results suggest that a much higher sequencing depth is needed to reliably identify DAS events than for DE genes. Our findings provide novel insights into tissue-level transcriptomic variations that are relevant to common cardiometabolic diseases.

Helen Geiger, Administrative Assistant

Quantitative Biology Graduate Program and

Gene Expression in Development and Disease

Biochemistry

603 Wilson Road, Room 212

East Lansing, MI   48824

Email: [log in to unmask]

Phone:  517-432-9895

QB Website: http://www.qbi.msu.edu/

GEDD Website: http://www.gedd.msu.edu/