In April 2013 Zoltán Kutalik was nominated as Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Biology and Medicine of the University of Lausanne. He will be working in the Statistics Unit of the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (IUMSP) of the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV).
Leenaards prize 2013
The team of Pierre-Yves Bochud (CHUV-UNIL), Zoltán Kutalik (UNIL-SIB), Oscar Marchetti (CHUV-UNIL) and Christian van Delden (HUG & UNIGE) received the Leenaards Prize 2013 for their project “Host genome and transcriptome: new diagnostic and treatment strategies for fungal infections“.
More details can be found: UNIL News, CHUV News, SIB News, UNIGE News, HUG News, Leenaards Foundation, 24 heures, Le Temps, L’Agefi, La Liberté
Multi-SNP association method reveals allelic heterogeneity
There are many known examples of the allelic heterogeneity and imperfect tagging phenomena. The former one is of great importance in monogenic traits but has not yet been systematically investigated and quantified in complex-trait genome-wide association studies (GWASs). We devised a multi-SNP association method that estimates the effect of loci harboring multiple association signals by using GWAS summary statistics.
Two novel SNPs associated with HCV-induced fibrosis progression
Only a fraction of patients with chronic HCV infection develop liver fibrosis, a process that might also be affected by genetic factors. We studied well-characterized HCV-infected patients of European descent who underwent liver biopsies before treatment.
Hypergenes eNOS discovery
The HYPERGENES Project investigated associations between genetic variants and essential hypertension pursuing a 2-stage study by recruiting cases and controls from extensively characterized cohorts recruited over many years in different European regions. Continue reading
Mirror extreme BMI phenotypes associated with gene dosage at the chromosome 16p11.2 locus
| Underweight and obese phenotypes can both pose health risks. But whereas obesity has been associated with a number of genetic variants, little is known about the genetic basis of underweight. A large-scale screen of data from 28 cytogenetic centres in Europe and North America now shows that being underweight is frequently associated with duplication of a short region on chromosome 16. Continue reading |
Novel method to estimate explained variance of GWAS hits reveals large fraction of the missing heritability
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are conducted with the promise to discover novel genetic variants associated with diverse traits. For most traits, associated markers individually explain just a modest fraction of the phenotypic variation, but their number can well be in the hundreds. We developed a maximum likelihood method that allows us to infer the distribution of associated variants even when many of them were missed by chance.
Hundreds of genomic variants are associated with human anthropometric traits
Via the CoLaus and Hypergenes cohorts our group contributed to the meta-analysis of the GIANT consortium that revealed hundreds of genetic variants associated with human height; 18 new loci for body mass index; and 13 new loci for waist-hip-ratio.
Genome-wide Association Study reveals new HLA-haplotype strongly protective against narcolepsy
We are involved in a Genome-wide Association Study on narcolepsy conducted by Mehdi Tafti’s Group at the University of Lausanne. In brief, we identified a haplotype in the HLA-region that is strongly protective against narcolepsy. More than 10% of HLA-positive controls carry this DRB1*1301-DQB1*0603 haplotype, which was found in virtually no narcoleptic cases. The research findings were published in Nature Genetics.