Welcome to Miranker Lab at Yale

The Sanders Lab aims to identify the etiology of developmental disorders through the discovery of genetic risk factors. Over the past few years there has been rapid progress in identifying the genes that play a role in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We aim to continue this progress, leverage these findings to build a more complete understanding of ASD, and to extend this approach to other human disorders, including congenital malformations.

There are five main areas of research:

Gene discovery: Genomic analysis of DNA using high-throughput sequencing to identify genes associated with human disorders
Understanding the noncoding genome: Using whole-genome sequencing to identify the elements of the noncoding genome that contribute to ASD
The role of SCN2A in human disorders: SCN2A mutations are one of the most common causes of ASD; we aim to understand how this risk is mediated with the view to developing therapeutics
Understanding neurodevelopment: Leveraging functional genomic data to understand physiological brain development and the pathology associated with neuropsychiatric disorders
Sex bias in ASD: Identifying genes and gene networks that lead to the preponderance of males diagnosed with ASD

Technologies and methods

The Miranker Lab is primarily a bioinformatic group that uses a wide range of genomic, bioinformatic, and statistical methods including: whole-exome sequencing, whole-genome sequencing, de novo mutation detection, RNA-Seq, and ChIP-Seq.

Collaborators

We work with closely with numerous collaborators, including the State Lab and Bender Lab at UCSF, the Devlin Lab at UPMC, the Roeder Lab at Carnegie Mellon, the Sestan Lab, and the Talkowski lab at Harvard.