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E-Mail: mbatze@lsumc.edu
Office: Department of Pathology
Louisiana State University Medical Center
Stanley S. Scott Cancer Center
New Orleans, LA 70112
Lab: (504) 568-8080
Office: (504) 568-6075
Fax: (504) 568-6037 |
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Mark A. Batzer
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| Research
Interests |
Study of human genetic
variation, genome structure, and the identification of the genes responsible
for several genetic disorders. The insertion of mobile elements into
the genome represents a new class of nuclear markers for the study of human
genomic diversity. The Alu family of mobile elements comprise 5%
of the human genome. Dr. Batzer's group is currently in the process
of identifying and characterizing new polymorphic Alu elements and the
levels of human genomic variation associated with these elements.
They are also developing haplotyping systems composed of polymorphic Alu
insertions and adjacent microsatellite loci to study the genome wide patterns
of linkage disequilibrium. They have also begun to develop the recently
integrated members of the L1 family of Long INterspersed
Elements (LINEs) for the study of human evolution.
The recently integrated LINE elements also share some common properties
with Alu repeats since both types of mobile elements are identical by descent
and have a known ancestral state. They are also interested
in determining (a) the local impact that mobile elements have had on the
accumulation of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the human genome,
and (b) how mobile elements have contributed to the architecture of the
human genome. These questions involve both wet bench comparative
genomics and genome wide computational biology. They are combining
these approaches to determine the levels of genomic instability associated
with mobile elements, and to analyze the dispersal patterns of mobile elements
within the human genome. |
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