Our graduate student, Jaanam Gopalakrishnan, continues to be recognized for the outstanding research she is doing in our lab to characterize the role of UBE2L3 in lupus. Last week (3/29/19), Jaanam was recognized as one of 10 selected finalists for the 2019 OUHSC Biomedical Engineering Symposium Poster Competition. Congratulations Jaanam!

Dr. Gaffney was appointed Chair of the new Genes and Human Disease Research Program at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation! We are extremely excited about the new genomics and data science research opportunities that this step will bring to our Foundation.

If you want more information about how to join our exciting new adventure, please contact us!

Our postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Yao Fu, received the OMRF Postdoctoral Travel Award for her poster presentation, titled “Studying Chromatin Accessibility in Human SLE at Single-Cell Resolution“, at the 2019 OMRF Scientific Retreat.  Dr. Fu has spearheaded our efforts to bring scATAC-seq to our research team and the OMRF community, with financial support from the Presbyterian Health Foundation.

Congratulations Yao! We are so proud of you!

The Gaffney Lab would like to thank the Presbyterian Health Foundation for their continued support of our ongoing mission to establish new state-of-the-art sequencing technologies in our lab.

Our newest award, titled “Developing proficiency in the sciATAC-seq technology“, aims to develop proficiency in a new method (sciATAC-seq) that uses combinatorial indexing of single cells to evaluate chromatin accessibility regulomes of SLE patients and controls. The method allows researchers to pool thousands of cells while maintaining the individual identity of each cell, thereby greatly reducing the single-cell sequencing cost.

The Gaffney lab is honored to welcome our newest and tiniest honorary member!

Congratulations Graham, Mandi, and the entire Wiley family on the newest edition!

We are proud to announce that our newest review on the role of the 3D genome in complex disease genetics is now published and available via open access in PubMed.

Go check it out at https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/HZrGC68G6GCrXxkLfp86du?domain=em.rdcu.be

or here: Fu, et al. Arthritis Research & Therapy. 2018.

We are happy to announce the publication of two high impact manuscripts, one that highlights an innovative new approach to predict causal variants of autoimmunity by mapping epigenomic modifications in the context of a three-dimensional genome, and one that highlights our ongoing mission to use whole exome sequencing to identify rare genetic mutations that cause human diseases.

Pelikan, et al. Nat Comm 2018: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05328-9

and

Kondo, et al. JCI Insight 2018: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30046013

Summer vacation means extra hands on deck. The Gaffney lab would like to welcome our summer OUHSC MD/PhD student, Matthew David Hart! Matt is tackling the CRISPR cloning strategies we need to answer exciting new questions about TNFAIP3 gene regulation.

Jaanam Gopalakrishnan received the OMRF Retreat Graduate Student Travel Award and Yao Fu received the OMRF Retreat Postdoctoral Research Travel Award at the 2018 Annual OMRF Retreat for their wonderful poster presentations! Way to go ladies! You two are both great representatives of the groundbreaking work we do in the Gaffney lab!

Ladies and gentlemen, she has done it again! We couldn’t be more proud of our graduate student, Jaanam Gopalakrishnan, for her excellent presentations at the 2018 OUHSC Graduate Research, Education, and Technology (GREAT) Symposium.  She is the recipient of the Graduate Student Association Award for Outstanding Research Travel Award.  Congrats again, Jaanam!