Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 5, Day 3) – More Data, More Problems: Tackling Genetic Epidemiology

Posted by hallep on Wednesday, July 27, 2016 in Grade 5, Grade 6, SAVY.

Good Evening Students and Parents,

I hope everyone had as much fun today in Tackling Genetic Epidemiology as I did!

We began the day with a quick review of what we learned yesterday. We then finished our Sanger sequencing activity and learned how to identify and classify mutations based on DNA sequence data. We then went to the computer lab to start our phenotyping for our genetic association studies using BioVU. Phenotyping in BioVU (Vanderbilt’s biorepository that links de-identified medical records with DNA) is challenging because you have to use insurance billing codes (ICD 9), medications, and other information in the medical record to identify cases and controls for your phenotype of interest. Each student needed to think creatively about how to identify their participants and find the codes, medications, and other features they would need.

In the afternoon, we extracted our own DNA from our cheek cells using salt water, dish soap, and isopropyl alcohol. Students were able to see their stringy, gooey DNA in the solution after lysing the cells and precipitating their DNA. Finally, we began watching the Nova episode, Cracking Your Genetic Code, in order to see all the ideas and techniques we have learned about this week applied in different real life scenarios

Tomorrow we will continue working in R and learn how to conduct regression analyses in R.

See you then!