Pollard Lab

The lab’s paper showing that there is no simple microbiome signature for obesity was covered in an interesting Atlantic article about the Anna Karenina hypothesis.

Graduate student Kathleen Keough presents her work on CRISPR genome surgery for dominent negative disease at the Pro Retina meeting in Potsdam.

Graduate student Hane Ryu and postdoc Nandita Garud gave lightning talks at a California Academy of Sciences NightLife with the theme Women in Science.

Katie Pollard speaks out about proposed cuts to federal science funding in The Atlantic.

Graduate student Hane Ryu is a finalist in the UCSF Grad Slam.

Katie Pollard is named a Biohub Investigator. Read the press releases from Gladstone and UCSF.

Lab alumnus Tony Capra was featured in the New York Times for his phenome-wide association study of Neanderthal variants in patients at Vanderbilt.

Scientific American interviewed Katie about Peter Dorrestein’s meta-metabolomics work.

Katie Pollard was promoted to Director at Gladstone Institutes. She is leading a new group focused on emerging technologies and informatics. Read the press release.

We published MIDAS, open source software and a genomic database for quantifying strain-level genetic variation in microbiome samples using shotgun metagenomics data. Our analyses of mother-infant microbiome transmission and global ocean population structure revealed striking patterns missed at the species level. Read the paper and press release.

We published a perspective on comparative metagenomics, focused on the challenges associated with accurate quantification of taxa and genes. Read the paper.

Our review of research about Human Accelerated Regions was published in The Scientist.

Alex Pico, Anders Riutta, and collaborators modernized WikiPathways and linked it to other biological knowledge bases using semantic web and ontology approaches. Read the press release.

Our work on Human Accelerated Regions was featured in a Live Science article about “Prehistoric X-Men”.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announces the National Microbiome Initiative that Katie Pollard helped to plan.

Katie Pollard, Nevan Krogan, Peter DiLaura, and Leah Makley speak about network biology at a Gladstone symposium on the Future of Precision Medicine.

Our machine-learning analysis of the 3D structure of the human genome revealed proteins bound to looping chromatin that predict the genes targeted by long-range enhancers. The study was published in Nature Genetics, highlighted in a News and Views by John Stam, and featured in a story in Nature Reviews Genetics. It was also recommended by F1000. More details are available in a press release.

We published a pair of studies with the Ahituv lab and Illing lab on limb development enhancers that distinguish bats from other mammals, one in PLoS Genetics and one in Nature Genetics. This work was covered by the Washington Post and other media. The study was featured on the Nature Genetics cover.

Katie Pollard is featured in a Carry the One Radio Podcast about microbiome science.

The White House solicits input on the Unified Microbiome Initiative, which we helped plan.