Onur Özer

Join Our Citizen Science Project!

We are mapping the house mouse hybrid zone in Schleswig-Holstein, DE, and you can help. Visit our House Mouse Hybrid Zone Project website to learn more jwinternitz.github.io/mouse-hybrid.... Funded by @dfg.de at @uni-hamburg.de

#DFG #musmusculus #wildmice

Direct effect of genetic ancestry on complex traits in a Mexican population Human populations differ in disease prevalences and in average values of phenotypes, but the extent to which differences are caused by genetic or environmental factors is unknown for most complex trai...

Brilliant paper by Visscher et al.

Populations differ in traits/disease burden. Are these differences due to genetics?

Comparing single variants or polygenic scores between populations is biased due to environmental confounders correlated with the variants.

1/3

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

I remember back when I was learning Python, a computer engineer mentioned objects and I asked "What is an object?" The answer was: "What do you mean? Everything is an object in Python!" and he continued without expanding.

I wish more explanations like this were available back then...

Out-of-Anatolia: Cultural and genetic interactions during the Neolithic expansion in the Aegean West Anatolia has been a crucial yet elusive element in the Neolithic expansion from the Fertile Crescent to Europe. In this work, we describe the changing genetic and cultural landscapes of early Hol...

Happy to share our new study from my PhD on the spread of farming across Anatolia and into the Aegean and then into Europe. @compevohumang.bsky.social

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

👇🏽

A Matriarchal Society Existed in Çatalhöyük During the Neolithic More Than 10,000 Years Ago, Researchers Find On the Anatolian plains, more than ten thousand years ago, one of humanity’s first major farming communities flourished, burying its dead beneath the floors of its homes. Now, two recently published s...

A Matriarchal Society Existed in Çatalhöyük During the Neolithic More Than 10,000 Years Ago, Researchers Find www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2025/06/a...

Have you recently registered as a blood marrow donor and got your HLA genotyped?
Why don’t you try this little app I built?

HLA PCA Viewer is a Shiny app that plots your HLA genotype onto a PCA space derived from the 1000 Genomes Project.

onur-ozer.shinyapps.io/hla-pca/
github.com/onur-ozer/HL...

I am honored and humbled to receive the Jon van Rood Award for Best Abstract at EFI 2025! My first EFI was amazing and I am looking forward to many more ahead! #EFI2025 #immunogenetics

#EFI2025 is about to kick off in beautiful Prague! 🇨🇿

I’ll be presenting in the Best Abstracts session on Saturday, sharing our work on ancient HLA diversity in Europe. Super excited for a week of science, new connections, and fresh ideas!

#HLA #AncientDNA #Immunogenetics #MHC

Anyway, I will cut it short. The people of Turkey are suffering under a crushing economic decline, political oppression, censorship, a degrading quality of education and a collapsed electoral system. We are digging under the rubble with the hope of seeing the light.

Resistance against the current regime is nothing new. I began my bachelor's in 2010, and my entire university life was marked by pepper spray, batons, water cannons, and plastic bullets. Yet, at the time, the regime was being praised in Europe for its supposed "democratic" values.

Sadly, all of this was not only supported by the usual suspects of the far-right, but also by liberals, greens, social democrats, etc. Anyone can be accommodated, even praised, as long as they are useful. This has been the case for the regime in Turkey for a long time.

Syria was handed over to an ISIS commander with a million-dollar reward on his head just a few months ago. Taliban leaders are quietly being removed from terrorist lists. The rabid far-right government of Israel gets unconditional support for its massacre of Palestinians.

Authoritarianism is on the rise across the globe, paving the way for extremist governments. In our interconnected world, ignoring the suffering of ordinary people is no longer an option. Unfortunately, the Western world has recently failed many tests in this regard.

Anybody who dares to speak up against the party-state feels "the Iron Heel". Hundreds of citizens -students, journalists, politicians- are under arrest, websites are blocked, TV channels are getting broadcast bans. All to ensure the continuation of a corrupt regime.

Turkey Resists By arresting İmamoğlu, Erdoğan banks on public apathy. He's getting the opposite.

This is not an isolated case, of course. If you have been following the news, you are likely aware of the ongoing political crackdown in Turkey. Here is a summary of the situation (from 5 days ago). Since then, the crackdown only escalated.

kulturkampftr.substack.com/p/turkey-res...

Polica in Turkey kicking a student who carries a Turkish flag

I have always been proud of my university ODTÜ in Turkey, not only for its academic success but also for the political stance of students. Right now, this is the treatment faced by students who stand up for democracy.

(photo credit unknown for now)

Leadership is busy beating their own best & brightest at universities right now. Plus, the stance that Turkey's ruling regime has adopted regarding Palestine is only performative, aimed at consolidating their voter base. They would shout a few words for that lady if they see benefit, nothing more.

I will present some results of this study together with our other projects on ancient #HLA diversity in Europe at the 38th European Immunogenetics & Histocompatibility Conference #EFI2025

#MHC #immunogenomics #ancientDNA

More importantly, we don't know if that haplotype was already common in WHG or not. Having some frequency data would allow us to estimate expected frequencies after the admixture and test whether the observed frequency can be explained solely by admixture or not.

What could be the reason for this excess WHG ancestry across the MHC region? Our pathogen screening did not provide any obvious target. There are some associations between DRB1*08:01-DQB1*04:02 alleles and some pathogens, notably the hepatitis-B virus. But was it enough to drive such a signal?

Combining targeted HLA genotyping with the genomewide data, we found that LF individuals carrying DRB1*08:01-DQB1*04:02 haplotype had an excess of WHG ancestry across the MHC region, suggesting that this haplotype introgressed from the hunter-gatherers.

We also observed an increased diversity from EF to LF. We hypothesized that this could result from the admixture between EF and WHG. Using a local ancestry inference method called RFMix and we found that across the MHC region, the WHG ancestry was much higher than the genomewide average.

We next moved to the part that I personally feel closer to: the HLA analysis. Using capture-based sequencing and a stringent genotyping approach, we managed to obtain HLA genotypes of 135 individuals (EF = 45, LF = 90). Overall, the Neolithic HLA diversity was lower than modern populations.

We observed that the WHG ancestry in LF exceeded what we expected from other contemporaneous farmers around Europe. This highlights the regional variation in cultural practices and interactions between communities. Furthermore, the WHG admixture appears to be male-biased.

We analyzed the genetic data of 125 individuals, 49 early farmers (EF) and 76 late farmers (LF). Remains of these individuals were recovered from seven sites within modern central and southern Germany. Right away, we observe an increase in WHG ancestry in the LF group, compared to EF.

For example, we can speculate that the alleles of the locally adapted WHG might have helped migrant farmers thrive in the novel environment or provide protection against local pathogens. Our aim was to investigate these changes between the early and late Neolithic farmers.

This picture has changed in the following millennia as we observe more and more WHG-related ancestry in farming societies. The evolutionary dynamics behind this admixture are still a matter of research, and some interesting questions remain open.

First, a short background. The first farmers of Europe were migrants from Anatolia. During the initial migration and settlement (approx. 7500 years ago) they remained mostly unadmixed with the local hunter-gatherers (WHG, "W" standing for western).

Admixture as a source for HLA variation in Neolithic European farming communities - Genome Biology Background The northern European Neolithic is characterized by two major demographic events: immigration of early farmers from Anatolia at 7500 years before present, and their admixture with local wes...

Hello Blue world!
I recently migrated from the old Twitter as I got tired of the continuous bombardment of far-right propaganda.
I intend to use this account mainly for scientific exchange with a pinch of politics.

So, why not start with a summary of our recent paper?
doi.org/10.1186/s130...