Genetics, Biomedical Computing and Genomics Seminar Series – “Harnessing alternative polyadenylation and tandem repeat to understand the genetic basis of human diseases”

Dr. Ya (Allen) Cui is a research assistant professor in Prof. Wei Li’s lab in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the University of California Irvine. Dr. Cui will open his own lab early next year. Dr. Cui’s research is focused on understanding the genetic association of tandem repeat (TR) and alternative polyadenylation (APA) association with complex traits and diseases, such as cancer, neurological, cardiovascular, and metabolic diseases. Dr. Cui will present his recently developed alternative polyadenylation transcriptome-wide association method (3′aTWAS) to identify APA-linked susceptibility risk genes (Nature Communications 2023) and an extremely exciting new research direction: TR-gnomAD, now known as TR-Atlas, a biobank-scale TR reference map for diverse ancestries (Cell 2024 and Nature Genetics accepted).