Gutenkunst Group

Congratulations to postdoc Justin Conover, who has accepted a position as Assistant Member and Principal Investigator position at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, MO. The Conover Lab will open June 1, 2025, and will be broadly interested in polyploid evolutionary genomics. Projects in the lab will range from population genetics to better understand the auto-allopolyploid continuum, to comparative genomics of diploids that have experienced ancient polyploidy events.

Low-pass genome sequencing is cost-effective and enables analysis of large cohorts. However, it introduces biases by reducing heterozygous genotypes and low-frequency alleles, impacting subsequent analyses such as demographic history inference. We developed a probabilistic model of low-pass biases from the Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) multi-sample calling pipeline, and we implemented it in the population genomic inference software dadi. Our model is widely applicable and substantially improves model-based inferences from low-pass population genomic data.

The Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament (GHIST) is an annual competition to showcase methods for inference from population genomic data. This year the focus is demographic history. Join the competition!

Congratulations to Linh Tran, who successfully defended her PhD in Genetics. After graduation, she will be doing a postdoc with Alison Feder at the University of Washington.

Together with Lindi Wahl's group, we have posted a preprint in which we use cancer genomic data to reveal the differing strategies hypermutator and nonhypermutator tumors use to access adaptive mutations.