The Bioinformatics Core in The University of Sheffield is looking for an Analyst with strong statistical skills and awareness of best-practices and reproducible research. Please see below for a summary and how to apply Summary The University of Sheffield and its associated Medical School and Hospitals are ranked as one of the nation’s top biomedical research...
Category: News
New analyst position in the Bioinformatics Core
The Sheffield Bioinformatics Core will be launching October 2017. A new analyst position has opened up within the Core. This position is suitable for anyone with experience helping others with statistical or computational methods used in the biomedical sciences. As a member of the bioinformatics core team, you will provide a comprehensive portfolio of...
Geographic Population Structure (GPS) technology uncovers ancient Ashkenaz
The origin of the Yiddish language (spoken at least since the 9th century A.D.), and consequently Yiddish speakers, has been debated for the past several centuries, mainly between linguists. While the Rhineland hypothesis suggests a German origin, the Irano-Turko-Slavic hypothesis, proposed by Paul Wexler, suggests a more complex origin starting with Slavic lands in Khazaria,...
Largest human population sequencing study to date (UK10K project) published in Nature
The findings of the UK10K study, a project to sequence the genomes of nearly 10,000 individuals, mostly from the UK, have been published online in Nature. Lucy Crooks is one of the lead authors. The project performed whole genome sequencing on nearly 4,000 healthy individuals and exome sequencing of over 5,000 people...
The dysregulated pathway that drives us low and high
Bipolar disorder refers to a chronic condition that consists of mood swings between two different mood poles, the high pole (mania) and the low pole (depression). In the course of their illness, bipolar patients may endure an increase in the frequency and severity of symptoms termed progression. Inflammation is the most potent biological mechanism to explain...
Unraveling the compositional architecture of mammalian genomes
For the past four decades the compositional organization of the mammalian genome posed a formidable challenge to molecular evolutionists attempting to explain it from an evolutionary perspective. We have carried the most detailed analyses to describe mammalian genome composition thus far. We debunked the “isochore theory,” which argues that the genome consists of long...
How old is “Adam Y chromosome”?
In early 2014, Mendez and colleague announced the identification of a Y chromosome haplotype (the A00 lineage) that is the most ancient Y chromosome (commonly termed “Adam Y chromosome”). The authors estimated its age at 338,000 years, at odds with all previous estimates in the literature and over a 100,000 years older than...
A new tool: Geographic Population Structure (GPS) infers biogeographical origin down to home village from your DNA
In 2014, Elhaik and colleagues published the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool in Nature Communications. GPS is the most accurate tool for predicting the geographic origin of world populations up to the past 1000 years. For example, the authors have demonstrated the accuracy of their tool using Oceanian islanders and Sardinian villagers. The...