This week on The Genetics Podcast, Patrick is joined by Dr. Ryan Dhindsa, Assistant Professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and PI at Texas Children’s Hospital, and Dr. Caleb Lareau, PI at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Assistant Professor of Computational Biology and Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. They discuss how a Twitter DM sparked a multi-year collaboration to extract Epstein–Barr virus signals from large-scale human genomic datasets, how measuring viral persistence in UK Biobank data reveals insights into autoimmune disease risk and host genetic control, and what this work means for understanding the long-term impact of chronic viral infections on human health.
Show Notes:
0:00 Intro to The Genetics Podcast
00:59 Welcome to Ryan and Caleb
01:58 How a Twitter DM led to a long-term collaboration
03:10 Rescuing Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) sequences from human whole genome data
04:45 Quantifying EBV persistence in UK Biobank, validating the signal, and uncovering links to autoimmune disease
12:00 Computational virology, chronic viral effects on human disease, and extending the approach to the broader human virome
16:59 Design considerations for population genomics programs to better capture chronic viral effects on human disease
21:30 Genetic, viral strain, and environmental factors that shape EBV persistence and immune control
26:09 Future directions for EBV research and expanding beyond European ancestry cohorts
29:46 Focus areas of Ryan’s research including rare variant genetics, neurological disease mechanisms, and pediatric population genomics
33:49 Focus areas of Caleb’s research including the human virome and expanding sequencing technologies to detect uncharacterized nucleic acids
37:03 Where genomic “dark matter” may underlie unexplained cancer and severe disease
38:46 Gaps in non-coding variant interpretation and incomplete penetrance in unsolved genetic disease
42:01 Closing remarks
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