The Division of Biostatistics at the Department of Preventive Medicine, UTHSC, invites you to attend the following seminar.
Time: Monday, July 15, 2:00 pm-3:00 pm CT
Location: 4th Floor Conference Room 400 in the Doctors Office Building at 66 N. Pauline Street, Memphis, TN 38105.
ZOOM Virtual Room Connection: Register in advance for this meeting
Seminar Website: https://www.eventcreate.com/e/biostatisticsseminar
Speaker Bio: https://attielab.biochem.wisc.edu/staff/emfinger-chris/
Systems Genetics of Diet Responsivity
Chris Emfinger, Ph.D.
Department of Biochemistry,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Diabetes, resulting from insufficient insulin secretion to match metabolic demand, affects hundreds of millions of people. Diabetes risk is highly heritable and the majority of single-nucleotide polymorphisms conferring diabetes risk are thought to influence insulin production. Conversely, environmental factors such as obesity and diet can elevate metabolic demand and drive resistance to insulin. Individuals display a wide variation in diet responsivity. Consequently, despite many years of research there is no consensus on a single diet most compatible with health and most useful in preventing or reversing metabolic dysfunction in susceptible individuals. Our lab focuses on understanding the genetic factors driving insulin production and diet responsivity. In contrast to many labs studying metabolism using only a handful of highly inbred mouse strains, we focus on mice with high genetic and phenotypic variation. This allows us to perform genetic screens in well controlled experiments with high power, identifying novel target genes regulating metabolism which we can then validate experimentally. This talk will be an overview of our genetics pipeline and some of the techniques we are currently applying to nominate and validate interesting targets.