Already-risen Exeter star Gareth Hawkes @drghawkes.bsky.social following up with the latest master class in how to use WGS data, >1 billion variant based GWAS. They bypassed the WES era as didn't want to leave out 99% of the genome :-) #ESHG2025

Come along today and see me and Harry begin to tackle the exponentially increasing population scale WGS data! #ESHG2025 #ESHG25

I will be talking today in Space 3. The session starts at 10:30, my talk will be at 11:15 Come join if you are interested in de novo mutations, non-coding genome, rare disease, or just up for seeing @nickywhiffin.bsky.social talk about RNU4-2 saturation mutagenesis after me 😂 #ESHG2025

Got a big showing of talented University of Exeter scientists with talks and posters at ESHG25 in Milan. Come along and find out more! @hls.exeter.ac.uk @exeter.ac.uk #ESHG25 @jamesfasham.bsky.social @jingzhan.bsky.social @ambermluckett.bsky.social @chundru.bsky.social @harrygreentkd.bsky.social

A really nice paper by @drghawkes.bsky.social et al. argues that rare and common genetic associations converge on the same genes. While this seems at odds with our recent work about how burden tests and GWAS prioritize different genes, our results agree (🧬🧪🧵 1/6) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to be able to announce I’ll be starting a 5-year MRC Career Development Award fellowship next week on the 1st April at the University of Exeter! Lots of work to do on whole genomes, and I’m hoping to keep contributing my small piece!

Last few days to apply! @exeter.ac.uk

Interested in a PhD & have strong computational skills ? Study diabetes & heart disease using peta bytes of human genetic & medical record data. In a lovely central European location and as part of a cohort of Genomics and Digital Health students : lifesciencesphd.unige.ch/jobs

Very interesting finding in this study led by @drghawkes.bsky.social: convergence between rare and common genetic associations. Implications for the genetic architecture of complex traits 🧪🧬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We finally have some well-powered whole-genome heritability estimates, including a quasi-behavioral trait (BMI). For height, ~89% of the heritability estimated to reside in common variants. For BMI and WHR, ~100% estimated in common variants. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Exeter doing some great stuff with biobank scale WGS at the moment! Whole-genome sequencing analysis of anthropometric traits in 672,976 individuals reveals convergence between rare and common genetic associations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Really excited to share our next population-scale WGS work preprint. Here, we analyse three anthropometric traits in nearly 700,000 individuals (discovery UKB ~450K, replication AoU). We show, for these traits, that common and rare variant heritability is convergent www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to finally share that our paper looking at the effect of rare non-coding variants using WGS on circulating protein levels in the UKB has been released in Nature Genetics @naturegenet.bsky.social! We now analyse the full 3,000 circulating proteins in all 50,000 individuals rdcu.be/ea16i

We’re hiring! Looking for a motivated data scientist/bio-informatician to join our team analysing WGS across biobanks via meta analysis, with a focus on T2D and its related traits. Please get in touch if you’re interested! tinyurl.com/3wdfc2me

A great opportunity to join us in Exeter as a Lecturer in Health Data Science: tinyurl.com/2sy7w2y5. Please get in touch if you're interested!

So happy to see this published in NatComms! tinyurl.com/yc66amvu Rare variant assocs with birth weight identify 9 genes. Insights into links between earlygrowth & later metabolic health. Great collabs between teams Exe&Camb. Amazing resources of UKB & deCODE made it possible.

Probably the best second-post on blue sky I could’ve hoped for

Hi everyone! For those who don’t know me, I’m a new PI & Lecturer in Health Data Science at the University of Exeter in the U.K. Interested in all things rare variant, whole genome sequences, bioinformatics and complex traits. Looking forward to joining this new audience!