Eid Mubarak friends!

Anthropological Genetics Lab at UMN Anthropological Genetics Laboratories at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Friends and Colleagues! I am SO excited to catch up with you all this week at #AABA2026! Here is a quick 🧵summarizing what our 🧪🧬👩🏽‍💻👨🏿‍🔬👩🏼‍🔬🧑‍💻lab will be presenting at the meetings (1/n) @umncla.bsky.social @umnanth.bsky.social

www.nievescolonlab.org

Glad to be part of a community that values the well-being and safety of its neighbors.

WATCH: Prem Attends Memorial at Scene of Murder in Minneapolis See what Prem saw at the memorial for the 37-year-old mother killed by ICE in Minneapolis, plus interview with Omar Fateh and residents.

We visited Renee Good's memorial.

There, we met a group of Somali Minnesotans — who too have been viciously attacked for weeks — warmly hosting everyone.

Flowers & stuffed animals galore.
Neighbors continually offering sambusas & hand-warmers & water.
Grief. And belief.

Scenes from Minneapolis:

My phone looks a little different from yours

I'm just delighted to announce our new preprint on genome-scale perturb-seq in CD4+ T cells. We learned both general lessons about the power of perturb-seq, and specific lessons about T cell biology.

Led by amazing postdocs Emma Dann and Ronghui Zhu, with my wonderful collaborator Alex Marson.

Co-expression-wide association studies link genetically regulated interactions with complex traits - Nature Communications Proteins can affect traits through their interactions with one another. Here, the authors propose the COWAS method to identify pairs of interacting genes or proteins whose genetically regulated co-exp...

My second dissertation paper is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! Here we introduce the co-expression-wide association study (COWAS) method for identifying pairs of genes or proteins whose genetically regulated co-expression is associated with complex traits. 🧵⬇️

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Determining the driving factors shaping genetic architecture of complex traits in recently admixed populations Understanding the genetic architecture of complex traits in admixed populations remains challenging due to heterogeneous genetic backgrounds and demographic histories. Mischaracterizing admixture can ...

Preprint online right before the holidays! Excited to share the first piece of work from the Zhang Lab, led by my absolutely stellar postdoc Michelle Kim! In this work, we ask how admixture, selection and demography shape complex trait genetics and GWAS performance www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Directional LD won’t be there *in expectation* in the absence of selection but can arise for a given realization of effects even for neutral traits.

Presumably your effects are drawn randomly and iid so this is expected. I suspect you’d see a difference if you introduce directional LD

As promised, a longer thread on what I consider to be some of the most interesting and important contributions of this paper (1/10)

Our first labsgiving/Diwali celebration 🪔!

Hey Yaniv Brandvain is not on Bluesky but his most recent biostats ebook is live ybrandvain.github.io/biostats/. His stats resources have been so helpful to me as I develop my own stats course, so check it out. Github repo here: github.com/ybrandvain/b...

reminder that my (wonderful, diverse, interdisciplinary) department at the University of Oregon is seeking applications for an Associate/Full Professor of Data Science -- deadline 10/31 and only cover letter/CV needed to apply

academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30328

I'm recruiting a postdoc for my group (based in beautiful Eugene, OR). Please get in touch if you're interested, esp if you'd like to chat at #ASHG25!

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

If you are at #ASHG2025 and would like to chat in person, please reach out! My lab is looking for curious scientists to join us, especially (but not limited to) postdoctoral researchers.

I will presenting a poster on Thursday on our recent work led by Kelsey Johnson (USC, not on Bluesky) on the genetic architecture of mtDNA copy number in human milk! Board #3049T!

@nicole-kleman.bsky.social also presenting on Wednesday on disentangling the effects of increased genetic diversity vs stratification in contributing to PGS prediction accuracy in admixed cohorts.

@sol-tb.bsky.social presenting on Wednesday on her work on the genetic architecture of mtDNA copy number in South Asians

We will be at #ASHG25 this year! Some presentations from our group, please stop by! :

🔔 Excited to share our preprint from the largest ever exome-wide association study for T2D in South Asians. We make important discoveries implicating the genes HNF4A, GP2, RNF19A in the aetiology of diabetes and metabolic traits in south Asians. 👉 Read it here:

Whoops, wrong hashtag.

If you are going to #ASHG25, check out the line-up!

This is perfect if you are a trainee who needs to network but has no idea how to do it. Instead of trying to corner someone at the posters (which is stressful!), schedule a slot and sit down for 15 minutes to chat!

Yes to both. Coverage can be uneven so good to be sure but probably overkill for mtDNA

We’ve done the former with mt genomes. I believe you end up with ./. calls for sites where only a few individuals carried an alt allele. So there’s an extra step (we wrote a script) to go through and fill those in with ref after making sure there were enough reads supporting that site

Super excited to see our reference bias work out in Cell! Reviewers gave us some excellent ideas, and Maria added on some new analyses that broke down how SNPs from heterospecific references mapped or did not map in a conspecific reference.

Homepage - Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference Visit our website to learn more.

Save the date! #PEQG26 June 9-12 2026 in Asilomar, CA. Happens only every 2yrs, but is my favorite conference. Full website coming soon, and registration and abstract submission opens November 14, but I'm allowed to tease that keynotes will be @jnovembre.bsky.social @jennytung.bsky.social and me!

I made a video about my new paper. I hope you enjoy it!

vimeo.com/1113132836?s...

Commensurate with his presence 😂🤣

Another fun year for the #mwpg, this year at the University of Minnesota! Great to see all the trainees participating with their cool work.