Tyler C. Collins

Alignment-free pan-k-mer profiles track minimap2 similarity (whole-chromosome r^2 0.959-0.968), profile 605 vertebrate genomes in about a day on 40 cores, and nominate trait-linked loci across plants and animals.

This study identifies genes linked to cancer risk variation across species, showing indirect effects on body size dominate cancer suppression, while direct effects increase tumour prevalence.

The paper develops a pan-TE annotation tool to analyze TE variation in maize, finding that tropical maize has more TE sequences due to active and less methylated LTR retrotransposons.