How genetic alterations propagate to organismal level traits?

Background: From GWAS we have a large collection of SNP associations to various organismal traits. There is a substantial gap between SNP associations from a GWA study and understanding how the locus contributes to disease. Organismal level phenotypes such as diseases are always related to some molecular level changes, the so called molecular phenotypes. These include, for example, the over- or under expression of particular genes. An effective way to understand disease mechanisms is by combining both genotypic and phenotypic data.

Goal: The goal of this project is to understand the underlying molecular mechanism through which the information on genetic alteration is propagated by integrating genotypic and phenotypic data.

Computational Tools: We will use R packages to cluster gene expression data and do the gene set enrichment analysis.

Mathematical tools: In this project we will study the hypergeometric test and matrix clustering.

Biological or Medical aspects: Finding new genetic associations for organismal traits through molecular trait.

Supervisor: Sarvenaz Choobdar

Project description: File:Genotype2phenotype.pdf