Alexander L. Starr

This study investigates how species-specific DNA methylation patterns arise, their functional consequences, and their role in natural selection, using human and chimpanzee methylation data.

The paper introduces FASTER, a method to detect accelerated evolution of function in genomic regions, finding more rapid evolution in conserved human sites linked to brain development and cognition.

The paper identifies a human-specific transcriptomic deletion in HMMR that affects cell division plasticity and links cortical expansion to cancer risk.

The paper identifies a human-accelerated neuron type linked to increased autism prevalence through evolutionary analysis of gene expression.

The paper decomposes evolutionary divergence into cell-intrinsic, extrinsic, and interaction components using reciprocal rat-mouse chimeras and finds cell-intrinsic factors dominate but extrinsic factors also play a role.

sc-SPLASH enables reference-free discovery in scRNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics, uncovering novel transcriptomic features like V(D)J recombination and secreted repeat proteins.