Leveraging genetic variation to understand chromosome pairing, meiosis and the evolution of human disease risk

We have the following specific aims: 1. To discover how normal pairing (synapsis) of homologous chromosomes during mammalian meiosis is genetically controlled in fertile and infertile individuals, and how synapsis first initiates, and then spreads. To do this, we will leverage naturally occurring genetic variation. Errors in recombination, and in synapsis, result in aneuploidy events, and chromosomal rearrangements due to NAHR, that cause many human disorders including infertility, pregnancy loss, cancer, and developmental syndromes. 2. To quantify how the chromatin accessibility and gene expression environments change during meiosis, using single-cell ATAC and RNA sequencing, and learn how proteins binding to DNA coordinate the onset and progression of meiosis, recombination, synapsis and impact fertility, and are impacted by genetic variation and chance. 3. To build from our existing approaches to understand population structure, in order to infer trees revealing the historical relationships relating hundreds of thousands of modern and ancient individuals, in humans and other recombining species. We will use these trees, which change along the genome due to recombination, to investigate how variation impacting complex diseases and other traits has arisen and been acted upon by natural selection, how selection changes through time, and how the rate of evolution itself evolves through time.