View Proposal #476
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| ID | 476 |
|---|---|
| First Name | Sabah |
| Last Name | Munir |
| Institution | Wartburg College |
| Speaker Category | undergraduate student |
| Title of Talk | Genetic Risk Factors for Preterm Birth |
| Abstract | Preterm birth, which affects 5-18% of pregnancies worldwide, occurs when an infant is born before 37 weeks of gestation. Studying the factors associated with preterm birth is important, for it is the leading cause of death in children under five years old. Besides many environmental factors, genetics also dictate the risk of preterm birth. This current research project is based upon the sequenced exomes of 93 pairs and 2 trios of sisters from Denmark who have a history of preterm birth. The goals of this project were to (1) develop gene burden tests to analyze the experimental data against the general population data obtained from the Exome Aggregation Consortium, (2) identify rare variants that may contribute to the risk of preterm birth, and (3) compare the two methods of statistical analysis that we developed. Gene burden tests collapse all variants on the same gene together, and then analyze each gene as a whole by determining the significance of its impact on preterm birth. Through R language, we developed a count-based method based on the Poisson distribution and a weighted version using the normal distribution. The genes producing the smallest p-values were examined further, which led to the identification of several promising variants to be studied more in future research. |
| Subject area(s) | Biostatistics |
| Suitable for undergraduates? | Y |
| Day Preference | SaturdayStrong |
| Computer Needed? | Y |
| Bringing a laptop? | Y |
| Overhead Needed? | Y |
| Software requests | |
| Special Needs | |
| Date Submitted | 10/05/2017 |
| Year | 2017 |