We've noticed some common missteps when using Burden Heritability Regression (BHR)

If you're using BHR, take a look at this new FAQ to avoid them!

github.com/ajaynadig/bhr/…

Long non-coding RNAs comprise a large part of the genome, yet loss of one copy (haploinsufficiency) of a lncRNA is not known to cause a human disease. Read our preprint to learn how deletions of the lncRNA CHASERR cause a severe neurodevelopmental disorder.medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

How stable are bacterial genomes as they adapt to an environment? My collaboration with Anurag Limdi, Alex Couce, Richard Lenski, and Olivier Tenaillon exploring this over 50,000 generations of evolution is out today!
1/
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Yet again--to nobody's surprise--Jay Shendure & co blow several fields'-worth of minds in a single paper 🤯🤯

Remarkable combination of cool tech + important but understudied problem

Tech like this will transform our understanding of how SVs impact cellular phenotypes & fitness!

New manuscript about BCFtools/liftover, a tool that converts genetic variants between reference genome assemblies with better support for indels and multi-allelic variants: academic.oup.com/bioinformatics… 1/8

This is an incredible essay:

Highly recommend this thoughtful op-ed from Dan Weiner in STAT

Very excited to post our latest work, MisFit, a method for estimating selection coefficient of missense variants in human. Yige Zhao led the project

Excited to share #LDSPEC . We detect pervasive nonzero correlations of derived allele causal effect sizes on #disease between nearby SNPs, challenging the common assumption that disease effects are independent across SNPs. #GWAS #GeneticArchitecture
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

Our germline mutation rate model have been published in Nature Genetics. Together with methods to estimate mutation rate, we designed novel validation metrics and characterized hypermutability associated with Pol III transcription.

HEELS (Heritability Estimation with high Efficiency using LD and association Summary Statistics), a new method to estimate local heritability using summary statistics.
Do you recognize the hotspots (in yellow) in the figure?
Li, Mazumder & Li. Nat Comm
nature.com/articles/s4146…

'Nothing has prepared me for the antisemitism I see on college campuses now,' new from UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. latimes.com/opinion/story/…

Behind a paywall, but here's the beginning.

For the same reasons, I too will resign as reviewing editor at eLife - the journal.

Like Michael Eisen, I am crushed by what happened in Israel and also deeply concerned about what is unfolding in Gaza.

In case you need some weekend reading, very proud of the new preprint from our group, Spearheaded by the superb recent PhD, Caoqi Fan, on leveraging the genealogical trees to better infer the demographic histories of human populations!

biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

The idea that any ethnic group has exclusive right to reside in a given plot of land is not a leftwing one. It's blood and soil nationalism. And in a contest between competing projects of ethnonationalist domination, the Palestinians cannot win.
nymag.com/intelligencer/…

More than 100 Harvard faculty denounce 'false equivalency between attacks on noncombatants and self-defense against those atrocities.'

The conflict is complex but 'the events of this week are not complicated. Sometimes there is such a thing as evil'

bit.ly/harvard-agains…

Has your university put out a statement about the massacres in Israel yet?

I'm delighted to release the first half of my new open-access online textbook in human population genetics:
web.stanford.edu/group/pritchar…

More information sessions on the BMI program coming up next week and in November! Harvard Integrated Life Sciences (HILS) Virtual Open Houses, October 3, 2023, 5-7pm; and November 1, 2023, 5-7pm: bmiphd.hms.harvard.edu/sites/projects…

🧬Join us in Boston Oct 17-18, 2023 for the
HarvardPQG Conference on Diversity in Genetics & Genomics. We have an amazing lineup of speakers: hsph.harvard.edu/pqg-conference…
📢Abstracts due September 25, 2023