Jenny Chen

cool study showing across all placental mammals, recombination is suppressed around the x inactivation center — a region of the genome that always make me think of the severance quote, “the work is mysterious and important”

hahah he was not wrong!

😂. was he pro-GWAS or pro-twin studies? or neither??

Each program told me that going to the other program would be a total waste of my time. Turns out both programs were wrong and our twin studies just overestimated the heritability 🤣

UW, a rival program, told me the Broad was nuts and that the missing heritability came from ultra-rare variants that they were going to find by deep sequencing families for private mutations. 3/

MIT/Broad Institute told me we were missing epistasis (interacting genetic factors) and that if I picked MIT I could be part of the revolution to do MOAR GWAS to be powered to find epistasis. 2/

When I was interviewing for grad school (2011), the “missing heritability question” was THE burning question in genomics 1/

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity!

We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have:
(1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs)
(2) better hand dexterity
(3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

I, too, can become aggressive toward my pups (children) when hungry #hangrymom #cantgentleparentonanemptystomach

Anyone out there know of a good public benchmark/dataset for rodent vocalizations?

Something intended for benchmarking ML models (detection, classification, etc) would be ideal, eg like AnuraSet but mice/rats/etc 🐀🐀🐀

#bioacoustics
#prattle💬
#neuroskyence

...and having a major work-life crossover moment as I post this snuggling my own newborn 👶

The parenting styles of deer mice Single-nuclei RNA-sequencing sheds new light on how two closely related species of deer behave differently when mating and caring for young.

A nice, layperson writeup of my latest work, which is now out on eLife!

TLDR: Using snRNA-seq, we find cell type abundance differences and sex-biased gene expression differences that may explain innate differences in mating + parenting behavior

elifesciences.org/digests/1031...

UGA asking the hard hitting questions on their faculty applications

for the original tweetorial: x.com/jjennychenn/...

Excited to share that my preprint about cellular differences in the hypothalamic preoptic region across behaviorally divergent deer mice is now reviewed on eLife! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Hello, world! Always exciting to join a new platform early enough to actually get my name as my handle 💃