Biology Seminar - Sohini Ramachandran

"Variations on a theme of structure: leveraging recent relatedness and mixed-membership clustering to gain insights from high-dimensional genomics datasets"

The scale of today's biobank and spatial transcriptomics datasets creates many opportunities for methods development. I will discuss two aspects of structure in these high-dimensional datasets my lab is actively working on, and how these projects developed over the last decade in my research program. First, I will cover how the presence of distant relatives in biobanks can enable inter-chromosomal phasing and reveal the rate of pedigree reticulations in recent human history. Second, I will draw on insights from mixed-membership clustering alignment in population genetic datasets over the last two decades to discuss opportunities for the application of mixed-membership clustering of spatial transcriptomic datasets.

Host: Lior Pachter