Talk at EMBL in July '24 [eur24embl]

Title: Topics in Neurogenomics & Genomic Privacy

Speaker: Mark Gerstein

Abstract:

My talk will focus on neurogenomics and how this has inspired my group
to become interested in genomic privacy and security. I'll first
discuss our work within the PsychENCODE consortium, where we created a
single-cell multiomics resource of the human prefrontal cortex. This
resource encompasses over 2.8 million nuclei from 388 individuals,
enabling the identification of expression quantitative trait loci and
cell type-specific regulatory elements. Our neurogenomics work has
encouraged us to develop computational tools, particularly expression
clustering algorithms. We used these to construct cell-type regulatory
networks and cell-to-cell communication networks, which change
substantially in aging and neuropsychiatric disorders. Furthermore, we
developed an integrative model to impute single-cell expression and
prioritize disease-risk genes and drug targets. Finally, I'll talk
about how important it is to keep large-scale cohort data,
particularly for mental illness, both private and secure. I'll
highlight some techniques that we have developed for security,
particularly in relation to assessing and mitigating privacy leakage
from genomic datasets.