School of Biological Sciences

Ascend, a new career development program for mid-career faculty, launched its cohort for Spring 2024. Supported by the Office of Faculty Professional Development, Ascend cohort members include academic professionals and lecturers from across campus.

The cohort will build on current strengths and successes and explore ways to thrive mid-career and in the future. Using a faculty learning community model and the Appreciative Inquiry framework, participants will explore their interests, values, and goals, and create an actionable, individual strategic plan while developing skills for career growth and leadership.

Members of the first cohort include:

Whitney Buser - Director of Master’s Programs and Associate Director of Academic Programs, School of Economics
Melissa Foulger - Artistic Director for DramaTech, School of Literature, Media, and Communication
Laura Sams Haynes - Director of Outreach, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mary Holder - Director of Neuroscience Program, Undergraduate Studies, School of Psychology
Christopher Jankowski - Director of Graduate Advising and Assessment, Director of Postdoctoral Teaching Effectiveness, School of Mathematics
Ashley McKeen - EXCEL Senior Lecturer, CEISMC
Nicoly Myles - Director of the Center for Academics, Success, & Equity (CASE), School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Amanda Nolen - Faculty Teaching and Learning Specialist, Center for Teaching and Learning
Matt Nusnbaum - Senior Academic Professional, Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience
Daniela Staiculescu - Senior Academic Professional, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Cassie Thomas - Associate Director of Undergraduate Transition Seminars, Office of Undergraduate Education
Ruthie Yow - Associate Director, Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Development.

Participants in this program will learn to use the Appreciative Inquiry model to develop a personal development plan that includes a vision and mission; goals for personal learning, professional development, and career momentum; and an action plan. The program is designed to support faculty as they practice skills essential for collegiality and leadership in a cohort environment and explore opportunities for growth and career vitality at Georgia Tech. Participants will also take advantage of four professional coaching sessions during the calendar year with International Coaching Federation-accredited Director of the Office of Faculty Professional Development Rebecca Pope-Ruark.

Learn more about the Ascend program.

You may be familiar with yeast as the organism content to turn carbs into products like bread and beer when left to ferment in the dark. In these cases, exposure to light can hinder or even spoil the process.

In a new study published in Current Biology, researchers in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences have engineered one of the world’s first strains of yeast that may be happier with the lights on.

“We were frankly shocked by how simple it was to turn the yeast into phototrophs (organisms that can harness and use energy from light),” says Anthony Burnetti, a research scientist working in Associate Professor William Ratcliff’s laboratory and corresponding author of the study. “All we needed to do was move a single gene, and they grew 2% faster in the light than in the dark. Without any fine-tuning or careful coaxing, it just worked.”

Easily equipping the yeast with such an evolutionarily important trait could mean big things for our understanding of how this trait originated — and how it can be used to study things like biofuel production, evolution, and cellular aging.

Looking for an energy boost

The research was inspired by the group’s past work investigating the evolution of multicellular life. The group published their first report on their Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE) in Nature last year, uncovering how their single-celled model organism, “snowflake yeast,” was able to evolve multicellularity over 3,000 generations.

Throughout these evolution experiments, one major limitation for multicellular evolution appeared: energy.

“Oxygen has a hard time diffusing deep into tissues, and you get tissues without the ability to get energy as a result,” says Burnetti. “I was looking for ways to get around this oxygen-based energy limitation.”

One way to give organisms an energy boost without using oxygen is through light. But the ability to turn light into usable energy can be complicated from an evolutionary standpoint. For example, the molecular machinery that allows plants to use light for energy involves a host of genes and proteins that are hard to synthesize and transfer to other organisms — both in the lab and naturally through evolution.

Luckily, plants are not the only organisms that can convert light to energy.

Keeping it simple

A simpler way for organisms to use light is with rhodopsins: proteins that can convert light into energy without additional cellular machinery.

“Rhodopsins are found all over the tree of life and apparently are acquired by organisms obtaining genes from each other over evolutionary time,” says Autumn Peterson, a biology Ph.D. student working with Ratcliff and lead author of the study.

This type of genetic exchange is called horizontal gene transfer and involves sharing genetic information between organisms that aren’t closely related. Horizontal gene transfer can cause seemingly big evolutionary jumps in a short time, like how bacteria are quickly able to develop resistance to certain antibiotics. This can happen with all kinds of genetic information and is particularly common with rhodopsin proteins.

“In the process of figuring out a way to get rhodopsins into multi-celled yeast,” explains Burnetti, “we found we could learn about horizontal transfer of rhodopsins that has occurred across evolution in the past by transferring it into regular, single-celled yeast where it has never been before.”

To see if they could outfit a single-celled organism with solar-powered rhodopsin, researchers added a rhodopsin gene synthesized from a parasitic fungus to common baker’s yeast. This specific gene is coded for a form of rhodopsin that would be inserted into the cell’s vacuole, a part of the cell that, like mitochondria, can turn chemical gradients made by proteins like rhodopsin into energy.

Equipped with vacuolar rhodopsin, the yeast grew roughly 2% faster when lit — a huge benefit in terms of evolution.

“Here we have a single gene, and we're just yanking it across contexts into a lineage that's never been a phototroph before, and it just works,” says Burnetti. “This says that it really is that easy for this kind of a system, at least sometimes, to do its job in a new organism.”

This simplicity provides key evolutionary insights and says a lot about “the ease with which rhodopsins have been able to spread across so many lineages and why that may be so,” explains Peterson, who Peterson recently received a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Gilliam Fellowship for her work. Carina Baskett, grant writer for Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection, also worked on the study.

Because vacuolar function may contribute to cellular aging, the group has also initiated collaborations to study how rhodopsins may be able to reduce aging effects in the yeast. Other researchers are already starting to use similar new, solar-powered yeast to study advancing bioproduction, which could mark big improvements for things like synthesizing biofuels.

Ratcliff and his group, however, are mostly keen to explore how this added benefit could impact the single-celled yeast’s journey to a multicellular organism.

“We have this beautiful model system of simple multicellularity,” says Burnetti, referring to the long-running Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE). “We want to give it phototrophy and see how it changes its evolution.”

Citation: Peterson et al., 2024, Current Biology 34, 1–7.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.12.044

The end of the year is often a time to look back and reflect on what has happened over the past 365 days. For Georgia Tech, it’s no different.

Here are some of the highlights and most widely read stories from the past year at the Institute — including a campus visit from Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss the climate crisis with College of Sciences faculty, record Institute enrollments and rankings, significant research advances, and $4.5 billion in contributions to the state economy.

Lizzie Wright was in 10th grade when she watched a TED Talk about controlling someone else’s arm with your brain.

“It got me thinking — we’re all walking around, talking to people, moving our hands, and just kind of taking it for granted,” she said. “We all have this brain and it looks pretty much the same on the outside, and has the same functions, yet we are all different. And we don’t fully know why. I wanted to know why.”

That curiosity led Wright to Georgia Tech, where she graduates this week with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience, with minors in health and medical science and philosophy. She leaves behind a community that has become a defining part of her life.

Through EXCEL, Georgia Tech’s postsecondary education program for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, Wright mentored five students and later served in a leadership role overseeing the entire group of mentors.

“EXCEL taught me more than anything else,” she said. “I learned skills like how to budget because we worked on that together, how to manage my time, how to walk into new environments and approach joining new clubs and groups.”

Wright was also selected for Ramblin’ Royalty in 2022, an honor bestowed on two students each year. Ramblin’ Royalty students serve throughout the year at campus events and in other leadership roles.

“I was nominated by my sorority, which was very humbling. I always thought about the idea of applying based on previous winners and what I’ve seen them do over the years, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up. Going through the process made me realize how much I love Georgia Tech and how grateful I am for this place, and it gave me a tangible way to give back.”

Through Greek life, Campus Outreach, and the EXCEL program, Wright not only found a path for her career but a path for her life.

“I joined all three my first year and just never really needed to find anything else. They all taught me that the Tech bubble, though it’s beautiful, there’s so much more outside of Tech, and that perspective kept me going. We’re all here for a reason, and that reason is to take what we’ve learned and go forth into the world.”

For Wright, that means completing her EMT certification with Grady Hospital and applying to medical school. Her passion for global health and medicine was solidified during a summer in Ethiopia working on a medical mission.

“It was my first full encounter with medicine. We were doing rounds one day, and the doctor I was working with came across this patient who had just had spinal surgery, but he had bedsores and needed to be lifted off the bed without having his spine compromised. Eventually, the doctor says, ‘My kid has a bike. Let’s take the tire off the bike, put it under his spine, and raise it so his skin can breathe.’ So he goes home, disassembles the bike, sterilizes the tire, and configures it in a way that raises the person up from the bed. And it worked. And it was just because his kid had a bike.

“That type of thinking — engineering thinking, even though I’m a neuroscience major — is so cool because you just work with what you’ve got.”

That unpredictability, and pursuing a career that could take her anywhere, is part of what drew Wright to medicine.

“That’s the reason I want to do EMT. You have no idea what you’re walking into. You have your jump bag, your partner, and your knowledge. What are you going to do? How are you going to help this person before you can get them to the hospital?”

As Wright prepares for Commencement, she’ll be joined by her family — including her brother Bishop, also a Tech graduate, who encouraged her to be a Yellow Jacket in the first place.

“He really pushed me early on to realize this wasn’t just a good school, but way more than that. Georgia Tech offers so much, but I would really advise most students to not just use it as a launchpad, but to acknowledge this place for the community it offers. I think that is key not only to enjoying the college experience, but really to seeing Georgia Tech for everything it has to offer and not waste these years.”

The College of Sciences is pleased to announce several new endowed faculty appointments for the 2023-24 academic year.

These appointments both recognize existing faculty within the College, and welcome new faculty members to the Institute — furthering the College of Science’s mission to cultivate curiosity, encourage exploration, and foster innovation to develop leaders and scientific solutions for a better world.

Chris Reinhard was appointed Georgia Power Chair this July, for a duration of five years.

The search for a second Georgia Power Chair, with expertise in energy efficiency, is ongoing this fall, led by the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

An associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Reinhard researches earth system science, with research interests that span astrobiology; biogeochemistry; climate, oceanography and weather; and space and planetary science.

Reinhard is already amplifying impact in his new position — this October, he was awarded a USDA Grant for a project that will aim to trap carbon while boosting crop yields.

“I am extremely honored and humbled,” Reinhard said, in a recent article about the grant. “I hope to use the position [as Georgia Power Chair] as a platform to collaborate on and advocate for climate-smart agricultural practices in the state of Georgia and beyond, and to amplify efforts that reimagine technically rigorous and socially responsible carbon removal across land and sea.”

Joel Kostka and Francesca Storici have been appointed Tom and Marie Patton Distinguished Professors.

Kostka, a professor and associate chair of Research in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, studies microbial processes, particularly those that impact Earth’s biogeochemical cycles and provide helpful ecosystem services. Much of Kostka’s work focuses on peatlands and wetlands.

Recently, Kostka received a $3.2 Million Department of Energy grant to support his research in Minnesota peatlands, which addresses climate change and carbon storage. Kostka is also actively engaged in community-driven science, collaborating on projects that address the impacts of sea level rise on Georgia’s coastal communities and natural wetlands.

Storici, a professor and associate chair for Graduate Education in the School of Biological Sciences, studies genome stability, DNA repair and gene targeting. Storici’s research focuses include cancer research, drug design, drug development and drug delivery. Previously, Storici has been named a Distinguished Cancer Scientist of the Georgia Research Alliance.

Kostka and Storici join Greg Gibson, who continues to hold the Tom and Marie Patton Distinguished Chair in the School of Biological Sciences. Kostka and Storici’s appointments recognize continued excellence in research, and were each awarded this September, for a duration of five years.

Tamara Bogdanović, Chandra Raman, and JC Gumbart have been appointed Dunn Family Professors in the School of Physics.

Bogdanović was appointed this August for a period of three years for her exceptional research in astrophysics, including supermassive black holes, accretion physics, and computational astrophysics.

Bogdanović serves as associate director of the Center for Relative Astrophysics, a Georgia Tech Center that aims to answer how the universe evolves and what our place is in the universe, while providing students outstanding education and training. Bogdanović is also a member and mentor of the Georgia Tech Society of Women in Physics.

Raman’s research investigates experimental atomic physics. By cooling atoms to temperatures near absolute zero, Raman explores a vapor’s unique capabilities for applications in quantum photonics, sensing, and many-body physics.

Raman also partners with engineers to build cutting-edge atomic quantum sensors, with goals of enabling a mass-producible product. Raman is also an IMat Initiative Lead in the fields of Materials for Quantum Science and Technology at the Georgia Tech Institute for Materials.

Gumbart’s research spans coronaviruses, bacterial cell walls, and Hepatitis B research, focusing on creating computational simulations of complex biophysical phenomena, with the aim of exposing the underlying physical nature of life at atomic resolution.

Gumbart is also passionate about outreach, collaborating on global hands-on workshops for college and graduate students, while also taking part in classroom demonstrations for K-12 students. “As part of our mission as scientists,” he shares, “we not only need to carry out cutting-edge research, but also train the next (and the next-next) generation of researchers.”

Benjamin Freeman and James Stroud have been appointed Elizabeth Smithgall-Watts Endowed Faculty in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech.

Freeman, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, is working to understand the impacts of climate change on biodiversity, with an emphasis on unraveling how montane birds are responding to climate change through biology and statistics. Freeman also prioritizes mentoring students, teaching, and leveraging citizen-science datasets.

Stroud’s research focuses on ecology and evolutionary biology, with emphasis on climate change and conservation biology. Stroud studies the evolutionary ecology of lizards to understand processes responsible for driving patterns of biodiversity. Stroud also spearheads several outreach programs, including Lizards on the Loose, a program that has reached over 20,000 middle school students.

The search for Smithgall-Watts Assistant Professors in the School of Psychology is ongoing this fall.

Joe Lachance has been appointed a Blanchard Early Career Professor.

The award is given to an associate professor who is within three years of having received tenure, who shows excellence in their field. First known as the Blanchard Fellowship, and launched in 1999 as a way to honor early career School of Chemistry and Biochemistry scientists, twenty-five scientists have received the award prior to the 2023 announcements.

Lachance, an associate professor in the School of Biology, studies population genetics and human evolutionary genomics, investigating questions regarding hereditary disease and health disparities. He also researches how human genomes have evolved in modern environments, and what human genomes might look like in the future. Lachance is also known for his support of student researchers, encouraging diverse individuals ranging from post-doc, graduate, and undergraduate levels to collaborate.

Rose McCarty and Xiaoyu He will join the School of Mathematics, School of Computing as Richard A. Duke Assistant Professors.

Rose McCarty, who studies combinatorics, will join the School of Mathematics and School of Computing in January 2024. Her research interests include structural graph theory and its connections to matroid theory, discrete geometry, finite model theory, and algorithms and complexity.

Xiaoyu He will also be joining the School of Mathematics, with research interests in extremal, probabilistic, and algebraic combinatorics, with specific interest in Ramsey theory, graph coloring, additive combinatorics, discrete geometry, and coding theory, with applications to computer science.

The Richard A. Duke Faculty Endowment was created by former Georgia Tech faculty member Professor Richard Duke to commemorate his over 34 year career as a faculty member in the School of Mathematics. His legacy continues through the Richard A. Duke faculty appointments.

Evolutionary Biology in Health and Disease is not a regular course offering at Georgia Tech. However, first-year students in the College of Sciences’ Explore Living Learning Community (Explore LLC) got to dive deep into the subject anyway — which meant reading lots of scientific papers and medical case studies while engaging in research.

Offered as a one-credit College of Sciences special topics course, Explore LLC undergraduates who are interested in research and pre-health studies get to learn about special science and mathematics topics that are not regularly offered in a typical curriculum.

The instructors for the new course are postdoctoral scholars and research scientists in the College, including Peter Conlin, the first instructor to participate in the course.

In addition to research and pre-health course opportunities, Explore LLC gives first-year students majoring in College of Sciences-related disciplines (biology, chemistry and biochemistry, earth and atmospheric sciences, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, and psychology) a unique opportunity to live among the highest concentration of science and math majors on campus in the same residence halls.

“Georgia Tech undergraduates often take general education/core classes in year one and two of their studies. However, undergraduates are also curious about research and advances in science and mathematics, especially in health-related areas and in improving the human condition,” said Cam Tyson, College of Sciences Assistant Dean. “A special topics course offered for Explore LLC participants was the perfect setting to bring together students with these interests, along with postdoctoral scholars and research scientists interested in sharing their knowledge and experience.”

Conlin’s inaugural course, COS 3801 HP: Special Topics: Evolutionary Biology in Health and Disease, hosted 16 Explore LLC students in the spring of 2023. Below are some of his comments:

Tell me how you approached developing this course in a way that would make the subject matter relevant to the Explore students?

Peter Conlin:

The original call for proposals requested “courses that will be of interest to first-year and sophomore students with a specific interest in a healthcare career and/or performing undergraduate research.” So, my course, Evolutionary Biology in Health and Disease, was designed from the ground up with this purpose in mind.

I wanted to connect the basic biological research with its medical applications, and encourage students to pursue undergraduate research opportunities. To this end, our in-class discussions, the homework assignments, and the final presentations for the class were all centered on reading and interpreting results from scientific literature and medical case studies. I also featured ongoing research at Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection whenever possible.

I made a point to advertise upcoming out-of-class seminars each week (especially those featuring speakers from Georgia Tech labs). Students could attend and summarize the talk they heard for extra credit points.

Any lasting lessons?

Initially, I think some of the students were a little shocked that their first assignment was to read a scientific paper for class. (Admittedly, the paper was not an easy one!) But by the end of the semester, after reading seven more papers for class and likely several others for their final presentation, I think they all felt much more confident about their ability to pick up an article, even on an unfamiliar topic, and work their way through it.

How did teaching the course help you as an instructor? 

At the beginning of the semester, I was consistently overestimating how much material I could get through in a single 50-minute class period. By the end of the semester, I felt that I had a better understanding of how long different activities would take, and we ended up finishing on time much more frequently.

I was so thankful for the Tech to Teaching for Postdocs class taught by Tammy McCoy (Teaching Assistant Development and Future Faculty Specialist at the Center for Teaching and Learning) while I was developing my syllabus. McCoy and College of Sciences Assistant Dean Cam Tyson really helped me to make this course a reality, so I’m very grateful to both of them for giving me this opportunity.

The feedback from the students?

The feedback from my students was critical to my success as an instructor. I explained to the students at the start of the course that I wanted to improve my teaching, that I would be actively seeking their feedback, and that I would do my best to make changes based on the feedback I received. Some of the changes included modifying the course content, as I did when I saw the level of enthusiasm and participation when we discussed cancer evolution. I revised my syllabus to continue discussions on this topic.

I also changed up homework assignments and in-class activities based on student feedback. This gave students more experiences with reading and discussing research papers.

I tried to experiment with different in-class activities and teaching styles, ranging from primarily lecture-based classes with occasional discussion questions, to a “flipped” classroom where students spent the majority of the time discussing the papers they had read in small groups. It was such a great experience to watch the students take such an active role in their learning.

Sebastian Horbulewicz, a second-year biochemistry major, was a student in Conlin’s Special Topics course:

I enjoyed the fact that we delved into a wide variety of topics, giving us small pieces with which we could use to build a broader understanding of evolution. Dr. Conlin’s succinct lessons gave me a lot to think about, and introduced me to new aspects of cancer, antibiotic resistance, virulence, and more. I think the course really shined in its ability to draw from current literature and the subsequent discussions we had in class.

For more information on Explore LLC and College Sciences Special Topics Courses:

The Explore Living Learning Community (LLC) of the College of Sciences strives to connect undergraduate students with faculty, and staff across the institute in order to encourage learning of career options, develop technical and team-building skills, and promote early access to undergraduate research and/or health-care affiliated co-curricular activities. The LLC fosters a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and self-discovery through a range of courses and activities offered to its participants.

A request for 2024-2025 academic year CoS special topics course proposals is expected to be distributed to CoS postdoctoral fellows and research sciences in February 2024.

The advent of whole genome sequencing technology has prompted an explosion in research into how genetics are associated with disease risk. But the vast majority of genetics research has been done on people of European ancestry, and genetics researchers have realized that in order to address health disparities, more needs to be done.

In a new study, Georgia Tech researchers investigated whether 25 rare gene variants known to be associated with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) play a role in risk for African Americans. While the rare variant associations were recently discovered in individuals of European ancestry, contributing to about 15% of cases, it was unknown if and how those same rare gene variants might affect risk for African Americans.

Led by Greg Gibson, Regents’ Professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences, the study highlights the importance of considering genetic diversity and the mixing of ancestry in genetics research. The findings were published in the journal Genome Medicine.

“Because of major advancements in the last decade, we now know that most diseases are far more complex than we originally thought, in terms of genetics,” said Gibson, who is also director of the Center for Integrative Genomics at Georgia Tech. “Understanding whether genetic differences contribute to health disparities is a major point of focus for current genetics research, and we had an opportunity to test one idea with this study.”

Today, African Americans have a similar prevalence of various types of IBD as European Americans. But progression is often much worse: African Americans are more likely to progress to severe disease requiring colectomies and other major interventions.

Courtney Astore, a Ph.D. student in Gibson’s lab and first author on the paper, wanted to assess whether those same rare variants would have a similar effect on IBD risk in African Americans. In a collaboration with Subra Kugathasan from Emory University and the NIH’s IBD Genetics Consortium, Gibson’s lab had analyzed the complete genome sequences of over 3,000 genomes of African Americans, half with IBD. Astore used that database to conduct her analysis.

She started by plotting the difference in frequency of the rare variants, and quickly realized that there was a significant reduction in prevalence of the variants in African Americans. Through further computations, she estimated that European ancestry variants actually only made a very small contribution to IBD in African Americans (around 44 additional cases per 100,000 people), fourfold less than Americans of European ancestry.

“Prior to our analysis, we suspected that admixture may play a role in the presence of IBD-associated rare variants in African Americans,” Astore said. “When I saw the differences, that was when I realized that there was something important there that we needed to discover.”

Astore then used a method known as chromosome painting, which is a tool for visualizing where each segment of the genome comes from. She showed that the rare variants found in African Americans were almost always located on segments of European ancestry genomes.

In simple terms, the location of the variants indicated that the genes resulted from admixture — a scientific term for mixing of genetic backgrounds throughout ancestry — which enabled Astore to show that the mutations had arisen outside of Africa, and only began to appear in people of African ancestry over the last dozen generations.

To conclude the study, Gibson and Astore assessed the presence of other rare variants associated with a dozen other diseases, which similarly confirmed that the presence of the variants contributes to African Americans generally through admixture.

The findings are important for several reasons. First, they highlight the value of considering genetic diversity and admixture in all genetics research, and especially when investigating rare variants and their associations with complex disease. While they showed that the European variants were rare in African Americans, there are almost certainly rare variants that contribute to IBD in African Americans that have yet to be discovered and may point to biological mechanisms.

“Doing more genetic studies on diverse populations, and especially those that have admixture, is going to be pivotal for therapeutic discovery,” Astore said.

Precision medicine will eventually be tailored to a person’s genome, which means that in some cases knowing the identity of rare variants will help guide therapy. If that is the case, knowing the context of ancestry will be beneficial. It also means that if more research on diverse ancestry groups isn’t done, then new treatments might not be effective for all people. The team also emphasizes that genetics is not the only factor contributing to risk for complex diseases like IBD, and their study simply highlights that it cannot be assumed that genetic discoveries are risk factors for all people.

“Our study emphasizes that in order to move in the direction of greater health equity, it is absolutely crucial to do large-scale genetic sequencing for African Americans and all ancestry groups,” Gibson said. “We hope our work will encourage more research on both social determinants of health and the genetics of IBD across ancestries.”

Note: The IBD Genetics Consortium, of which Gibson is a part, organized the cohort of African Americans with IBD, and their samples were gathered at institutes across the country, including Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, Cedars Sinai Los Angeles, and Mt. Sinai New York.

Funding: National Institutes of Health

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13073-023-01244-w