Nowick Lab

Our manuscript has been accepted for publication in Ecology and Evolution. Congratulations to Baja and Vanessa!

Are you interested in provenience, human remains at FU and ethical considerations? We are discussing this in a new seminar series organized by Vanessa. It takes place Tuesdays at 5pm in the big lecture hall of the Zoology building (Koenigin-Luise-Strasse 1-3). You are invited to come, to listen to inspiring talks from us and guests and to discuss with us!

An interview with more information about Vanessa and our provenience project can be found here.

Our manuscript on mtDNA “Nomenclutter” and its Consequences on the Interpretation of Genetic Data has been accepted and recoomended by PCIEvolBiol. The very nice recommendation can be found here. Congratulations to Baja and Vanessa!

We submitted our manuscript on our study of functional relationships between KRAB-ZNF genes and transposable elements (TEs) to bioRxiv: “Regulatory networks of KRAB zinc finger genes and transposable elements changed during human brain evolution and disease”. In this work, Yao and Arnaud discovered that gene expression as well as regulation of TEs differs in the human brain compared to other primates. It also has changed in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. To perform this comparative assessment of TE:KRAB-ZNF relationships, Yao developed an R package, called TEKRABber, which is publicly available on Bioconductor.

You have submitted your preprint entitled mtDNA “Nomenclutter” and its Consequences on the Interpretation of Genetic Data” to PCIEvolBiol, the Peer Community In for Evolutionary Biology. Baja and Vanessa describe very clearly the history of the nomenclature of human mitochondrial haplogroups, its inconsistencies, and what can go wrong if not properly applied in human population genetics studies.

We are happy to announce that we could finally hire Anne as our new technician. We are getting up to speed with our experiments 🙂

We have a new PhD student, Marula Mathew, who is strengthening the wetlab site of our team. Welcome Marula!

Laura Schmidt joined our team to work on gene regulatory factors with human specific changes. She will use primate iPSC to comparatively investigate how such factors might have contributed to unique pathways and expression patterns during human brain development.

On February 24th 2022 we gave a talk about our work for the general public at the Urania in Berlin. More than 100 people joined online and about 50 people had been in the auditorium. The talk is now available online and also here.

Title and abstract of our talk (in German):

Evolution des menschlichen Gehirns: Wie aus genetischen Änderungen kognitive Leistungen werden

Im Lauf der Evolution wurden menschliche Gehirne immer leistungsfähiger. Doch welche genetischen Änderungen führten dazu? Und wie testet man, ob und wie eine genetische Änderung kognitive Fähigkeiten ändert? Katja Nowick und Jeong-Eun Lee berichten, wie ihre Arbeitsgruppe mit bioinformatischen Methoden Gensequenzen findet, die spezifisch bei Menschen sind und für die Evolution unseres Gehirns relevant. Sie berichten, wie sie derartige Gensequenzen im Labor auf ihre Funktion hin testen.

Yao-Chung has developed an R package called TEKRABber to compare relationships between transposable elements (TEs) and genes between species. It is now available from Bioconductor:https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.15/bioc/html/TEKRABber.html.

Using RNA-Seq data, the package is normalizing expression values for genes and TEs across species and calculates correlations between TEs and genes. These correlations can then be compared between species to detect potential evolutionary differences in TE regulation and/or TEs influence on gene expression.

The name of the package derived from the idea that TEs are often repressed by KRAB-ZNF proteins.