Epigenetics

Using matched frontal brain and peripheral blood samples, this study shows that blood DNA methylation profiles partially inform on immune cell type proportions in the brain, consistent with a link between peripheral and central nervous system immune function.

RAMEN, an R package that dissects the individual, additive and interactive contributions of genetic variants and environmental exposures to DNA methylation variability, applied to cord blood samples from the CHILD and PREDO cohorts.

DNA methylation-based analysis of whole blood from the CHILD cohort at ages one and five reveals age- and sex-associated differences in immune cell proportions and epigenetic profiles during early childhood, prior to puberty.

CellsPickMe, an R package for reference-based blood cell deconvolution from DNA methylation data that integrates cord and adult references, improving accuracy in cord, pediatric and adult blood samples for longitudinal birth cohort studies.

Feature at the Ubyssey

(Spanish; 5 minutes) Presentation at the Latinamerican Conference About the Use of R in R&D 2024. Here I talk about what gene-environment interactions are and how we can identify them in DNA methylation using RAMEN.

(English; 13 minutes) Oral presentation at the International Conference on Bioinformatics 2024 ISCB-Latin America SoIBio CCBCOL.

Interview for the Newsletter of the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia.

Infancy and early childhood are highly sensitive periods in human development. DNA methylation (DNAme), an epigenetic tag that is deposited on DNA, has been proposed as one of the mechanisms by which early life experiences can become biologically embedded. This project aims to model DNA methylation variability and the contribution of genetic variation and environmental differences to it.

(10 minutes) Presentation at the Vancouver Bioinformatics User Group meeting in September 2023. Sharing the stage with my supervisor Dr. Keegan Korthauer, who talks about the overall research themes in our lab.