Global Impact of Statistics in Biological Sciences

• Activity Number: 274
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section for Statistical Programmers and Analysts
• Author(s): Eimear Kenny*+ and Ryan Poplin*+ and Joseph Pickrell*+ and Karim Chine*+
• Companies: Mount Sinai and Broad Institute and Harvard Medical School and Cloud Era
• Keywords: biology ; genomics ; DNA sequencing

Abstract

In the past decade, the cost of obtaining genomic information has fallen by many orders of magnitude. Human genomes, once costing billions to characterize, are today collected and sequenced by the thousands, and may be supplemented with information describing both short-term cellular state and long-term regulation and physical structure of the genome. Large-scale mapping efforts have uncovered much of the landscape of genetic variation in humans and other species. In parallel, efforts to share data produced by many projects around the world have enabled studies of association between genetic markers and phenotypes across hundreds of thousands of individuals. This global perspective on genomic variation underpins new insights into topics as diverse as cellular processes and demographic history.

Decreasing costs of generating DNA sequencing information has driven this revolution, but crucial to its success has been the increasing generality and robustness of the statistical tools used to process and interpret genomic data. In this session, panelists will discuss their use and development of statistical methods driving this current change in biology. Particularly, we will focus