Catherine Stanhope

TL;DR: The inconsistent association between asthma and gene expression levels in blood or lung cells from older children and adults suggests that genotype effects may mediate asthma risk or protection during critical developmental windows and/or in response to relevant exposures in early life.

TL;DR: This study suggests that SNPs regulating GSDMB expression in airway epithelial cells have a major role in childhood-onset asthma, whereasSNPs regulating the expression levels of 17q12-21 genes in resting blood cells are not central asthma risk.

TL;DR: This work developed a novel Bayesian method for high-dimensional longitudinal data and showed that race-associated DNAm patterns at birth and age 7 are nearly identical and genetic factors explained an overwhelming majority of the variation in DNAm levels at other, previously identified, environmentally-associated CpGs.

TL;DR: It is shown that race-associated DNAm patterns in blood are present at birth and are primarily genetically, and not environmentally, determined, but also that DNAm in blood cells overall is robust to many environmental exposures during the first 7 years of life.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used an upper airway epithelial cell (AEC) culture model to assess transcriptional and epigenetic responses to rhinovirus (RV), an asthma-promoting pathogen, and provide context-specific functional annotations to variants discovered in GWASs of asthma.