Kimberly Olney

Gene regulation, genetics, computational biology, evolution, sex-chromosomes

Genetic males and females share highly similar genomes, only differing in the sex chromosomes, yet males and females are morphologically and physiologically very distinct. Perhaps surprisingly, most sex-differential genes are not on the sex chromosomes (XY), suggesting that sexual dimorphism in aspects of human biology, such as development, physiology, metabolism, susceptibility to disease, and wound healing, develops through sex-specific gene regulation. Advancing technology: Current approaches for detecting gene expression and allelic imbalance expression are confounded by technical variance inherent in RNA-seq data. The methods I am working on statistically models technical variation in the sequencing data to avoid false positives. Contribution to Science: I am characterizing patterns of sex-differential gene expression to provide an important reference for healthy patterns of sex-differential transcription in early development placenta tissues. Education: These results will be central to our understanding of sex-differential regulatory variation, epigenetic modification, and mechanisms responsible for sexual dimorphism. The benefit to humanity: The computational pipelines that I develop will be publically available, enabling other researchers to generate directly comparable results and further expand our understanding of molecular sexual dimorphism in an array of biological scenarios.