We've got jobs (altatech.io/careers/)
In particular, we are looking for a senior/principal Protein Engineering Scientist and Process Engineers as we scale up our bench scale process to full commercialization. We are in Boulder, CO which is a great place to live!
A project many years in the process, we’re pleased to present our work on multi-ancestry meta-analysis across a boatload of traits in the UK Biobank: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
@bpasaniuc.bsky.social might win the best title at #CSPrecisionGen25
#CSPeecisionGen25
Honored to give the opening talk at the inaugural Cell Sumposium for precision genomics for human health in San Diego #CSprecision25
Thank you for coming to the meeting and for your great talk!
We’re excited to share this work and hope it proves useful across GWAS, PRS, heritability, and environmental confounding studies.
Massive congratulations to @RoohyShemirani and our whole team for seeing this through.
Feedback and collaborations welcome! 🧵👇
9/9
Method is open-source & scalable 🚀
➡️ Python package: github.com/roohy/spc
➡️ Simulation framework: github.com/roohy/msprim...
8/9
Why does this matter?
As we move into diverse biobanks and rare variant discovery, we will need more methods. SPCs offer a modern toolkit for accurate, scalable correction of recent demographic structure.
7/9
Environmental confounding?
SPCs dramatically improved adjustment:
📉 Reduced Moran’s I more than PCs
📊 Avoided false heritability from geography
🧬 Preserved signal from true polygenic traits
6/9
Rare variant GWAS?
In UKBB inflation factor dropped from 7.6 (PCs) to 1.2 (SPCs) — helpful for uncovering real associations instead of noise.
5/9
In simulations, SPCs captured >90% of fine-scale population structure with fewer components than PCs, which explained <50%.
In GWAS of environmental phenotypes, SPCs reduced genomic inflation by 12%, while matching PC performance for highly heritable traits like height.
4/9
SPCs offer a novel solution:
✔️ Based on IBD graphs, not allele frequencies
✔️ Transforms local IBD sharing into continuous covariates using graph spectral theory
✔️ Works out-of-the-box with large datasets (tested on N ≈ 420K from UK Biobank)
3/9
Population structure is a major confounder in GWAS and heritability estimation.
Principal Components (PCs) have been the default — but they fall short for recent, non-linear, fine-scale structure, especially in rare variant analyses.
2/9
📢 Just posted: Our preprint introducing SPC — Spectral Components — is now live on medRxiv!
Led by Dr. Ruhollah Shemirani and years in the making, this method offers a robust, scalable way to adjust for recent population structure in genomic analyses.
🔗 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/9
Oh no, I’m so sorry to hear this. Condolences to his family and friends.
A conclave of scientist ..
Very enjoyable visit to the Broad Clinical Lab in Burlington yesterday and a tour of their world class sequencing and omics facility 🧬. Really impressive.
And some really beautiful art work too…
Thanks @heidirehm.bsky.social and Niall Lennon for hosting.
#BlueSkyDrive #Broadies
A conclave of scientist ..
Very enjoyable visit to the Broad Clinical Lab in Burlington yesterday and a tour of their world class sequencing and omics facility 🧬. Really impressive.
And some really beautiful art work too…
Thanks @heidirehm.bsky.social and Niall Lennon for hosting.
#BlueSkyDrive #Broadies
Incredible GRC Genetics and Genomics conference line-up this year in Portland, Maine (www.grc.org/human-geneti...). With conference-maxxing sessions that run to 9:30pm!
Submission deadline is June 8th, conference July 6-11th.
Thanks Sarah! 💛
Thank Simone!!! 💛
Thanks Joe! 💛
Honored to be featured in ASHG’s #WomensHistoryMonth celebration! Huge thanks to @GeneticsSociety & @sarahtishkoff.bsky.social for the recognition.
Grateful to stand alongside incredible women shaping human genetics & genomics! 💙 #ASHG #WomenInSTEM
www.ashg.org/publications...
🌍 Hillerød, Denmark from May 19-23, 2025,
🚨 Abstract submission closes March 15, 2025—still a few spots left! Submit yours here: sciencecluster.dk/event/genomic-mechanisms-of-disease-2025
📢 Excited to be an invited speaker at the @NovoNordiskFoundation Science Cluster Conference, "Genomic Mechanisms of Disease"!
Join me to explore cutting-edge research in med & pop gen, ML models of biology, and translational therapeutics.🔬✨
#Genomics #AIinMedicine #GeneticResearch #Conference
📹🍿🧬 Check out @yunfeng-ruan.bsky.social's recent talk at the @broadinstitute.org, "Polygenic risk scores: method development and application" in our growing collection of videos on the @prsdiversity.bsky.social website primedconsortium.org/education#vi...
Truveta has built a database of 120M de-identified EHRs for digital phenotyping—and now they're teaming up with Regeneron and Illumina to sequence 10M patients across 30 US health systems.
🧬 Major move for precision medicine!
www.geekwire.com/2025/seattle...
One month left until the CSHL Biology of Genomes abstract deadline! 👇👇👇
Where else can you dive into all things genomics? 🧬✨
