Highlights of Applied Research in Biostatistics
One major interest in genetic studies is to dissect the genetic factors that cause phenotypic variations, especially certain diseases. In this study, we are interested in another type of genetic variation: copy number alterations, which include deletions and amplifications of DNA sequence, ranging from less than one kilobase to multiple megabase pairs. Read more.
Research Professor John S. Preisser, PhD, who is interested in correlated categorical data, spends a lot of time thinking about teeth. According to Preisser, “Dental researchers collect a large amount of data, often with complex correlational structures. When you or I sit in the dental chair to have our teeth examined, the dentist examines and records detailed health-related information on every surface of every tooth.” As a biostatistician deeply involved as a collaborator in dental research, Dr. Preisser often considers whether a research question is best addressed with such detailed data, or whether data aggregated at the patient level will suffice. Read more.
Over the past decade, microarrays have gained much popularity in their applications, allowing the measurement of biological activity on a genome wide scale. The recently developed Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) platforms, however offer better genomic coverage, dynamic range of signal, and resolution than microarrays, allowing scientists to better understand the etiology and progression of diseases such as cancer. Combined with Chromatin Immunoprecipitation (ChIP-seq), for example, it allows for accurate determination of protein-DNA interaction sites. Read more.