Matthew J. Christmas

This paper uses GWAS in dogs and humans to identify a gene network linked to compulsive disorders, revealing biological pathways not detectable in human studies alone.

The paper presents a single nuclei RNA sequencing resource of dog brain cells, identifying cell types and revealing differences in opioid receptor expression compared to humans and mice.

The paper examines mammalian evolutionary constraint at synonymous sites, finding significant constraint in 20.8% of four-fold degenerate sites and biases toward G/C content and splice sites.

The paper identifies proteins and regulatory elements associated with vocal learning by analyzing bat neural activity and epigenomic data.

TOGA integrates gene annotation and orthology inference across hundreds of genomes, improving ortholog detection and creating large comparative gene resources.

A machine learning approach identifies enhancer-phenotype associations across mammals, revealing links to brain size and behavior evolution.

The paper curates TE content in 248 mammalian genomes, finding trends in recent TE accumulation and associations with dietary habits.

A 240-species placental mammal alignment resolves constraint to single bases, estimating at least 10.7% of the human genome is constrained, with 48.5% of constrained bases unannotated.

The paper uses evolutionary constraint scores to identify functional genomic regions and finds they are enriched for variants associated with common diseases.

The paper identifies bats as a hotspot for horizontal transfer of DNA transposons, finding over 200 putative elements and shared transposons across mammals and reptiles.