Alex Strudwick Young

Excited to share our preprint on PGI portability across ancestries—now on bioRxiv. With co-authors @aysuo.bsky.social, @paturley.bsky.social, @alextisyoung.bsky.social, and @Dan_J_Benjamin. Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... Thread below for details.

PGI Repository v2.0 preprint out! A 🧵 on the main results and updates @robel-alemu.bsky.social @paturley.bsky.social @alextisyoung.bsky.social

Genomics of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder Nature Reviews Genetics - Genomic advances have enhanced our understanding of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder, revealing genetic architectures and risk mechanisms...

New review on the genetics of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder.

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

Genome Science UK 2025 Newcastle University

UK Genome Science meeting - Newcastle. 9th - 11th July 2025. Great speakers. Great community.
Early bird registration-16th May
Abstract submission-23rd May
Registration close-26th June
If you want that sweet sweet early bird deal - get going quick!
www.genomescience.org.uk

Some really interesting contrasts in our new "assumption-free heritability" preprint: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Siblings are not always 50% genetically similar! The difference may vary from 40 to 60%!

Our preprint uses this difference via sibling regression to estimate "assumption-free heritability" of socio-cognitive traits /1

@eivindy.bsky.social @rafaelahlskog.bsky.social @renemottus.bsky.social

Great work on estimating heritability using sibling relatedness variation (estimated using my software package snipar). Surprisingly low h2 for education and high h2 for IQ (with large SE). Give it a read!

I am recruiting a quantitative/computational postdoc to my group at UCLA. This is a great opportunity to work on foundational theory, methods, and software in statistical genetics. Link to apply: recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10275. Please repost!

A great opportunity to work with @alextisyoung.bsky.social if you're interested in methods development!

🚨 EBI has just lunched a new portal to calculate genetic scores from individual-level genetic data.

Check it out 👇. It is very cool!

geneticscores.org

It is linked with the @pgscatalog.bsky.social

This was supported by INTERVENE

Posting on behalf of Shamil Sunyaev: Eimear(Vice Chair) and I (Chair) are organizing the 2025 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Human Genetics and Genomics, which will be held on July 6-11, 2025 in beautiful University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine.

I am recruiting a quantitative/computational postdoc to my group at UCLA. This is a great opportunity to work on foundational theory, methods, and software in statistical genetics. Link to apply: recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10275. Please repost!

Instead of listing my publications, as the year draws to an end, I want to shine the spotlight on the commonplace assumption that productivity must always increase. Good research is disruptive and thinking time is central to high quality scholarship and necessary for disruptive research.

Yeah isn't this exactly what one would expect and similar to things like bmi?

Science’s 2024 Breakthrough of the Year: Opening the door to a new era of HIV prevention A drug with a novel mechanism protects people against the AIDS virus for 6 months. It could speed the end of the epidemic—if those who need it most get access

Our UU colleague Wes Sundquist won the 2024 Breakthrough of the year! His long-term research into the structure and function of HIV’s capsid protein has led to the development lenacapavir, a game-changing new treatment that is extremely effective at preventing HIV.
www.science.org/content/arti...

Parent-of-Origin inference and its role in the genetic architecture of complex traits: evidence from ~220,000 individuals Parent-of-origin effects (POEs) occur when the impact of a genetic variant depends on its parental origin. Traditionally linked to genomic imprinting, these effects are believed to have evolved from p...

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

CGC1, a new reference genome for Caenorhabditis elegans The original 100.3 Mb reference genome for Caenorhabditis elegans , generated from the wild-type laboratory strain N2, has been crucial for analysis of C. elegans since 1998 and has been considered co...

After 5 years, our team has a new telomere-to-telomere gap-free reference genome for C. elegans. We published our first results in 2019; I thought we'd have our loose ends wrapped up by spring 2020. That prediction was ... slightly off.
But here's the genome now!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Tumour mutational burden: clinical utility, challenges and emerging improvements - Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology Tumour mutational burden (TMB), reflecting the number of mutations present in the DNA of a tumour, is a biologically appealing biomarker of a response to immune-checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs). Nonethele...

Tumour mutational burden: clinical utility, challenges and emerging improvements

I see. Well yes but it might be tricky because inherited variants would tend to have smaller effect sizes than de novos independently of assortment.

I'm not sure why assortment would affect this?

When there is assortment, common and rare variant contributions will become correlated and this needs to be taken into account when analyzing either.

This paper provides the first direct evidence of this by showing a surprisingly large correlation between the common variant education polygenic score and a rare variant burden score.

It's possible that this is because the parents' genetics affect the offspring through the env but it could be assortment: parents with lower education polygenic scores based on common variants are more likely to mate with individuals with rare variants that cause neurodevelopmental conditions.

Great to see this paper out in Nature today!

One aspect that I worked on was the curious result that the education polygenic score predicts neurodevelopmental conditions but this prediction disappears within family.

a couple of cartoon characters standing next to each other with one wearing a purple earring Alt: a couple of cartoon characters standing next to each other with one wearing a purple earring

📣 Big news! Our tag-team effort on common variants in rare neurodevelopmental conditions is now out in Nature 📣

Co-first authoring with the brilliant Qinqin Huang🌟—proof that teamwork does make the dream work. 💪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Large-scale exome sequencing identified 18 novel genes for neuroticism in 394,005 UK-based individuals - Nature Human Behaviour In 394,005 UK individuals with exome sequencing data, Wu et al. find 56 neuroticism-associated genes (18 novel) and quantify the heritability explained by rare coding variants, highlighting the associ...

Large-scale exome sequencing identified 18 novel genes for neuroticism in 394,005 UK-based individuals #icanhazpdf? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Detecting cognitive decline before its symptoms start In his research on the brain, Daniel Gustavson looks for clues about when cognitive decline beginsAccording to Daniel Gustavson, assistant research professor in

Check out this University of Colorado newsletter that describes work being done by IBG faculty member @dangustavson.bsky.social using the VETSA twin dataset to examine genetic and environmental influences on cognitive decline. www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2...

New graph algorithms for analysis of the genomes and pangenomes of bacteria and their mobile elements. at University of Bath on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - New graph algorithms for analysis of the genomes and pangenomes of bacteria and their mobile elements. at University of Bath, listed on FindAPhD.com

I'm advertising a PhD studentship (open to international students) working on long read pangenome / assembly algorithms in bacteria. Would suit someone with maths/compsci/coding background. Aptitude + interest more important than experience.
Details here:
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Review: Inference and applications of ancestral recombination graphs https://www.nature.com/articles/s41576-024-00772-4 (read free: https://rdcu.be/dVyQH) 🧬🖥️

Perhaps this has not been said yet here:

Include figures and legends in the manuscript along with the text. Otherwise, I may not read your preprint. If I have to review it without them, I’ll be starting off on the wrong foot. I love science, but don’t make me angry.