Publications by authors named "Highsmith Max"

As an aneuploidy, trisomy is associated with mammalian embryonic and postnatal abnormalities. Understanding the underlying mechanisms involved in mutant phenotypes is broadly important and may lead to new strategies to treat clinical manifestations in individuals with trisomies, such as trisomy 21 [Down syndrome (DS)]. Although increased gene dosage effects because of a trisomy may account for the mutant phenotypes, there is also the possibility that phenotypic consequences of a trisomy can arise because of the presence of a freely segregating extra chromosome with its own centromere, i.

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Large offspring syndrome (LOS) and Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome are similar epigenetic congenital overgrowth conditions in ruminants and humans, respectively. We have reported global loss-of-imprinting, methylome epimutations, and gene misregulation in LOS. However, less than 4% of gene misregulation can be explained with short range (<20kb) alterations in DNA methylation.

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Chromatin conformation plays an important role in a variety of genomic processes, including genome replication, gene expression, and gene methylation. Hi-C data is frequently used to analyze structural features of chromatin, such as AB compartments, topologically associated domains, and 3D structural models. Recently, the genomics community has displayed growing interest in chromatin dynamics.

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Chromatin conformation plays an important role in a variety of genomic processes. Hi-C is one of the most popular assays for inspecting chromatin conformation. However, the utility of Hi-C contact maps is bottlenecked by resolution.

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Background: Cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) is widely used in the determination of the three-dimensional (3D) structures of macromolecules. Particle picking from 2D micrographs remains a challenging early step in the Cryo-EM pipeline due to the diversity of particle shapes and the extremely low signal-to-noise ratio of micrographs. Because of these issues, significant human intervention is often required to generate a high-quality set of particles for input to the downstream structure determination steps.

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Advances in the study of chromosome conformation capture technologies, such as Hi-C technique - capable of capturing chromosomal interactions in a genome-wide scale - have led to the development of three-dimensional chromosome and genome structure reconstruction methods from Hi-C data. The three dimensional genome structure is important because it plays a role in a variety of important biological activities such as DNA replication, gene regulation, genome interaction, and gene expression. In recent years, numerous Hi-C datasets have been generated, and likewise, a number of genome structure construction algorithms have been developed.

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Over the past decade, methods for predicting three-dimensional (3-D) chromosome and genome structures have proliferated. This has been primarily due to the development of high-throughput, next-generation chromosome conformation capture (3C) technologies, which have provided next-generation sequencing data about chromosome conformations in order to map the 3-D genome structure. The introduction of the Hi-C technique-a variant of the 3C method-has allowed researchers to extract the interaction frequency (IF) for all loci of a genome at high-throughput and at a genome-wide scale.

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