Master's Project Defense: “Discover schizophrenia-associated genes with a novel statistical method” | Department of Mathematics

Master's Project Defense: “Discover schizophrenia-associated genes with a novel statistical method”

Event Information
Event Location: 
GAB 461
Event Date: 
Thursday, July 11, 2019 - 2:00pm

Professor Wang invites you to attend the Master's project defense of Bailu Zhang

"Discover schizophrenia-associated genes with a novel statistical method"

Abstract:

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric mental disorder with a lifetime prevalence of around 0.7% and highly heritability of 60%-80%, despite affected individuals have fewer offspring. Schizophrenia usually become apparent in late adolescence or early adult life, which means it is probably beginning before one was born. The etiology of schizophrenia still remains unknown due to the disorder's wide-ranging effect on thinking, memory, and behavior. Previous genetic studies of schizophrenia suggest that both common and rare variants have associations with schizophrenia, where rare variants with large effect size are particularly difficult to detect due to the low frequency. We proposed a General and novel approach to Test association between an Optimally Weighted combination of variants (G-TOW) to a disease. We applied G-TOW method on the Sweden-Schizophrenia Exome Sequencing data (6135 case and 6245 controls). The Monte Carlo approximation of the classical permutation test (randomization test) is time-consuming with this dataset. We have utilized the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) computer architecture to accelerate computation times. We identified a number of promising genes for further investigation.

Cookies and coffee will be served in GAB 472 following the event.