Late Lunch Talk: Introducing two genomic techniques: Relate and GWAS

This Late Lunch Talk will be held on Zoom:

https://uio.zoom.us/j/69514338194

Meeting ID: 695 1433 8194

 

Documentation on how to use Zoom can be found here:

https://www.uio.no/english/services/it/phone-chat-videoconf/zoom/

 

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In January, we attended the Workshop on Population Speciation Genomics in Cesky Krumlov where we learned genomic methods and techniques. For this Late Lunch Talk we will present two of these methods: Relate (Lane) and GWAS (Lourdes). 

Relate is a new software package for genealogy construction and analysis introduced by Simon Myers group at Oxford University. Relate offers the capacity to create genealogies, scalable up to tens of thousands of samples, that is capable of “simultaneously estimating branch lengths, mutational ages and variable historical population sizes, as well as allowing for data errors” (Speidel et al., 2019). In their introduction of the new method, Speidel et al. applied Relate to 1,000 Genomes Project data. I will present on the statistics behind Relate, its benefits and limitations, and the application to the human genome.

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) is a whole genome study to identify genetic variation associated with a particular trait in different individuals. For instance, one genotype can be associated with multiple phenotypes, which are responding to different environments. How important is the role of the environment within these associations? How are these associations shaping the structure of a population? GWAS has been a great tool to answer biological and ecological questions in this matter. Yet, it has had as main focus associations between SNPs and human diseases. However, it has slowly been applied to other genetic variants and different traits with great importance in agricultural and forestry fields. I will present on the importance and usefulness of this method.