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CCMT Seminar Series - Nov. 28, 2022
3615 Civic Center Blvd
Philadelphia, PA 19104
United States
The Raymond G. Perelman Center for Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics presents a Lecture Series:
Using Cell-Specific Epigenetics to Discover the Genetic Basis of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
Speaker
Jonathan Cooper-Knock, MD, PhD
Consultant Neurologist and Senior Lecturer
Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience
University of Sheffield, UK
Description of Research
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is an archetypal complex disease with a polygenic architecture. Despite high heritability, the latest ALS genome-wide association study (GWAS) identified a genetic risk factor in <10% of patients. We previously applied ATAC-seq to profile chromatin accessibility within normal motor neurons (MNs). By focusing on regulatory regions in MNs, our machine learning method reduced the search space by >90% and uncovered 690 ALS risk genes, corresponding to 35% of SNP-based heritability. In contrast to standard GWAS, we were able to identify a genetic risk factor in >50% of sporadic ALS patients. Now we are using single-cell multiome profiling of motor cortex tissue to discover ALS genetic drivers associated with the complete set of CNS cell-types.
Host
Ophir Shalem, PhD
Please email shalemo@chop.edu if you would like to meet with the speaker.