Genetics and Genomics Commons^™

Power Analysis In Applied Linear Regression For Cell Type-Specific Differential Expression Detection, Edmund Glass

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of many human disease-oriented studies is to detect molecular mechanisms different between healthy controls and patients. Yet, commonly used gene expression measurements from any tissues suffer from variability of cell composition. This variability hinders the detection of differentially expressed genes and is often ignored. However, this variability may actually be advantageous, as heterogeneous gene expression measurements coupled with cell counts may provide deeper insights into the gene expression differences on the cell type-specific level. Published computational methods use linear regression to estimate cell type-specific differential expression. Yet, they do not consider many artifacts hidden in high-dimensional gene expression …

Investigating The Molecular Etiologies Of Sporadic Als (Sals) Using Rna-Sequencing, David G. Brohawn

Theses and Dissertations

ALS is an often lethal disease involving degeneration of motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Current treatments only extend life by several months, and novel therapies are needed. We combined RNA-Sequencing, systems biology analyses, and molecular biology assays to elucidate sporadic ALS group-specific differences in postmortem cervical spinal sections (7 sALS and 8 control samples) that may be relevant to disease pathology. >55 million 2X150 RNA-sequencing reads per sample were generated and processed.

In Chapter 2, we used bioinformatics tools to identify nuclear differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between our two groups. Further, we used Weighted Gene Co-Expression Network …