Massively Parallel Reporter Assay on Substance Use Variants

The Won Lab uses massively parallel reporter assays (MPRA) to determine the regulatory potential of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) risk variants for complex traits and human disease. Supervised by Dr. Hyejung Won and Dr. Michael Love, I performed vector engineering and analyzed the results for in vivo MPRA. After inserting variant and barcode pairs to the newly engineered vector, analysis on barcode representation was developed and done for individual variants on R scripts. I also helped optimize tissue harvesting and DNA/RNA extractions by visualizing and performing statistical testing on results. Because the wet bench work takes a long time before obtaining data to analyze, I also determined outliers and outlier cutoff values for a previous project done by Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) which Dr. Won is part of. PGC performed GWAS on eight psychiatric disorders and identified pleiotropic loci which affected more than one disorder, and my job was to find and justify outlier cutoff values for each measured variant.