Nick Yankovsky, PhD, Russian Academy of Sciences

Human Health Variability within Great Human Diaspora:  A Challenge for Computational Biology

Genetic structure of human populations is formed by population prehistory as well as both genetic and environment factors. I will talk on genetic differences between ethnic populations affecting alcohol metabolism and human health.

New genome wide approaches are used to find association between human genes (from single SNPs up to GWAS and whole genome sequence), gene expression levels (methylation profile, transcriptome and proteome analysis) and susceptibility to diseases. Population level data analysis is one more way to find molecular targets for therapy and predictive medicine. Current genomic, epigenomic, gene expression, etc. databases have abundant data but are not yet sufficiently connected. This area of research has significant potential for finding relationships between different levels of modeling of human biology from genotypes to specific phenotypes to general traits such as human health and wellness.