A UNC Lineberger researcher was a co-author of a paper published Friday in the journal Science.
Andrew Nobel, PhD, a UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center member, was a co-author of a paper published Friday in the journal Science by the GTEx Consortium. The GTEx consortium is an international group of researchers working on a National Institutes of Health-sponsored effort to increase our understanding of how inherited changes in genes contribute to common human diseases.
For the study “Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) pilot analysis: Multitissue gene regulation in humans,” the researchers analyzed RNA sequencing data from 1,641 samples across 43 tissues from 175 different people in order to identify complex patterns of genetic regulation across tissues.
“Through an extended, collaborative effort the GTEx consortium is trying to improve our understanding of how an individual’s genotype is translated into the expression of multiple tissues,” said Nobel, who is a professor in the UNC Department of Statistics and Operations Research and the Department of Biostatistics at UNC. “Understanding how a common set of genetic instructions are interpreted differently in different tissues is an important scientific problem, and an important first step in understanding mechanisms that link genetic variation and disease.’’
Nobel is a member of the GTEx consortium and is a co-principal investigator of a group at UNC and at N.C. State University that’s carrying out statistical and computational analyses of multi-tissue data.