Department of Statistics Seminar
North Carolina State University

presents

Dr. Bruce Weir

North Carolina State University

"Analyses of HapMap data on human variation: the culmination of 40 years association with NC State University"

ABSTRACT

My work on population genetic theory and analysis dates from my arrival in Raleigh in August 1965 as a graduate student to work with Clark Cockerham. Over the next few years we worked together on methods to accommodate dependencies among events at pairs of genetic loci. By the early 1970s data were becoming available for up to ten or so loci for up to about 100 individuals per sample. In 2005 there have been two publications that each report on data at over one million loci (SNPs), although sample sizes are still less than 100 per population. Building on the foundations established by Cockerham, and extending the work in the 1984 paper by Weir and Cockerham, we have looked at these two large datasets. The two papers were consistent in their findings: there is substantial genetic similarity among individuals, regardless of whether they live in the US, Ibadan, Beijing or Tokyo. The variation that does exist is almost as great within as between populations, and the degree of variation differs substantially along the chromosomes. By breaking up the usual measures of genetic variation into population-specific components, it appears to be possible to refine the search of signatures of natural selection acting on the human genome. A description of this work will be interspersed with some recollections of statistical genetic activity at NC State University over the past 40 years.

References:

• Hinds et al. 2005. Whole-genome patterns of common DNA variation in three human populations. Science 307:1072-1079.
• International HapMap Consortium. 2005. A haplotype map of the human genome. Nature 437:1299-1310.
• Weir et al. 2005. Measures of human population structure show heterogeneity among genomic regions. Genome Research 15:1468-1476.

Friday, December, 2, 2005

3:35 - 4:35 pm

2215 Williams Hall

Refreshments will be served on the second floor of Dabney Hall (left of Room 222) at 3:00 pm.