Monday, November 18

Special DCM&B Seminar - Thursday November 20, 2013 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM - Dr. Melissa Wilson Sayres, Miller Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTATIONAL MEDICINE & BIOINFORMATICS
SEMINAR

Thursday November 21, 2013
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Forum Hall Auditorium, 4th floor, Palmer Commons Building
"Sex-biased evolution and disease"
Presented by:

Faculty Recruit

Dr. Melissa Wilson Sayres
Miller Postdoctoral Fellow
University of California, Berkeley

ABSTRACT

Sex-biased processes occur on a variety of levels, from the differentiation of our sex chromosomes, to population dynamics, to the way that diseases affect each sex. The human sex chromosomes, X and Y, were once an indistinguishable pair of autosomes, but over the past 180 million years have become quite different. The Y has lost 90% of the ancestral gene content, but still retains relics of its ancestral partnership with the X. The Y chromosome, inherited through the genetic paternal line, and being nearly devoid of homologous recombination, also experiences evolutionary processes differently that regions that recombine. As such, studying patterns of genome-wide diversity can provide a unique insight into the history of sex-biased demography and selection acting on the Y chromosome. In addition to sex-biased genomics, many diseases, such as the autoimmune disease, Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), act in a sex-biased manner. RA affects three times as many women as men, and its onset and severity are affected by a complex interaction between genotype and environment. Particularly, pregnancy often has an ameliorating effect on RA disease activity. I will discuss work to: 1) understand the degradation of the Y, and how this process has affected the X chromosome; 2) illuminate the history of sex-biased demography and selection acting on the Y chromosome; and, 3) evaluate gene expression variation across clinical RA patients in the natural human model system of pregnancy.