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Biology Colloquium: Dr. Tarjinder Singh '12, Harvard Medical School

Fri, September 21st, 2018
1:10 pm
- 2:30 pm

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“The promise of human genetics in uncovering the biological mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders and mental illnesses”
Abstract:  In the past two decades, notable technological and methodological advances in human genetics has enabled the analysis of the genetic code of many tens of thousands of individuals, and for first time, a comprehensive look into the genetic factors underlying human traits and diseases. This has been particularly revealing in the study of mental illnesses, where our understanding of the genetic and environmental causes are still limited. Here, I will discuss the emergence of next-generation sequencing as a tool in identifying large-effect protein-coding variants that are associated with higher risk of mental illnesses, with a focus on schizophrenia. I will first review earlier results from the UK10K project, in which the analysis of over 5,000 case exomes revealed a schizophrenia risk gene and shared connections with broader neurodevelopmental disorders. I will then present preliminary results from the Schizophrenia Exome Sequencing Meta-analysis Consortium, a global collaborative effort to further accelerate genetic discoveries in schizophrenia through the analysis of over 75,000 individuals. These analyses are identifying genes and biological processes that underlie mental illnesses, and provide one avenue in acquiring clues on possible drug targets that may lead to more effective treatments.
Bio
Tarjinder Singh, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Daly research group at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and Affiliate of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Genetics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Tarjinder Singh is a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Mark Daly’s group at the Massachussetts General Hospital and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Genetics. Mentored by Dr. Daly and in close collaboration with Dr. Benjamin Neale’s group, he currently works on the meta-analyses of sequencing data in psychiatric traits. Specifically, Tarjinder is involved in the analysis of whole-exome data from the SCHizophrenia Exome sequencing Meta-Analysis (SCHEMA) consortium, which seeks to leverage rare coding variants from over 24,000 patients to identify individual risk genes for schizophrenia. It is hoped that the identification of these genes and subsequent biological experiments interrogating their function can spur a better understanding of the underlying biology of disease in psychiatric disorders.
Tarjinder was awarded his B.A. in Biology, Mathematics, and Economics by Williams College in Western Massachussetts in 2012. He completed his doctoral studies at University of Cambridge in 2016, where he studied the role of rare coding variation in the genetic architecture of psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
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