Research Focus

Common diseases, such as osteoporosis, impart significant societal health burdens. These diseases are, in part, regulated by genetic determinants and understanding their genetic basis is critical to the development of effective therapeutics. In recent years, technological advances, such as sequencing the genomes of multiple species and the ability to perform bioassays in a massively parallel fashion, have made it possible to begin to understand disease in a systems context. Systems-biology attempts to determine the direct and interactive roles of all cellular and physiological components (transcripts, proteins, metabolites, etc.) in diseased and normal states using data from high-throughput genomic studies.

Our lab is using systems approaches to investigate the molecular basis of bone strength. The goal of this work is to combine genetics and global gene expression profiling in the mouse to identify genes and pathways which influence bone strength related traits using techniques such as causality modeling between expression and physiological traits and generating disease focused gene co-expression networks. An additional component of this work is testing hypotheses generated by systems-analyses using in vitro cell based assays and transgenic mouse models.

About Arby

Arby is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He uses systems genetics approaches to elucidate the genetics of osteoporosis.

About Atum

Atum Buo, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Public Health Genomics. Atum specializes in bone research and his current work focuses on elucidating the impact of genetic variation on bone strength and skeletal health. Dr. Buo hopes that his research will lead to the discovery of new genes that play a role in bone strength and ultimately contribute to the development of therapies against bone diseases such as osteoporosis.

About Gina

My primary focus in the lab is development of new assay methods for the measurement of osteoblast and osteoclast phenotypes as well as the development of novel protocol methods and mouse models to meet our research needs.

About Basel

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Dr. Charles Farber’s lab at the University of Virginia. I’m currently interested in the systems genetics of complex traits, and my current research deals with unraveling the systems genetics underlying bone strength and strength-related traits.

In my research, I utilize computational tools and methods, such as transcriptomic network learning, as well as molecular biology bench work, in order to further understand the genetics underlying bone strength.

About Will

I am a biostatistician at the University of Virginia Center for Public Health Genomics. My research leverages system genetics approaches to elucidate the gentics of bone strength. As a computational researcher, I conduct analyses for bulk RNA-seq, single cell ATAC-seq and RNA-seq, and transcriptome wide association studies.

About Larry

I have spent over 25 years studying varying aspects of DNA replication and genome instability, from in vitro studies of polymerase elongation complexes to the development of methods for whole-genome studies in mammalian systems. In the last 7 years I have been working on developing a pipeline for verifying candidate genes from GWAS studies using mouse models coupled with human and mouse cell model systems.