High Res

Matthew T. Weirauch, PhD

Academic Affiliations

Assistant Professor, UC Department of Pediatrics

Phone 513-803-9078

Email matthew.weirauch@cchmc.org

Hide All

Specialties

Hide

Transcription factors; transcriptional regulation; functional genomics; genome analysis

Visit the Weirauch Lab.

Biography

Hide

Matthew T. Weirauch, PhD, a faculty member in the Center for Autoimmune Genomics and Etiology (CAGE), is a computational biologist with special emphasis on genomic approaches for studying transcription factor (TF) interactions with DNA, and how genetic variation proximal to these interactions contributes to human diseases. He recently spearheaded large-scale efforts for the experimental and computational determination of sequence binding motifs for eukaryotic TFs (Weirauch et al., Cell, 2014), and RNA binding proteins (Nature co-first author, 2013). He has also been involved in numerous high-profile genomics efforts, including an evaluation of algorithms for TF-DNA recognition (Weirauch et al., Nature Biotech, 2013), and the largest genetic interaction studies performed to date in both C. elegans (Byrne et al., Journal of Biology, 2007) and S. cerevisiae (Costanzo et al., Science, 2010). Recent work in his group focuses on how disease-associated genomic regions affect TF binding, and how these alterations affect disease onset and progression (Wang et al., Mol Cancer., 2010; Qian et al., Pediatr Blood Cancer, 2014; Kottyan et al., Nature Genetics, 2014; Martin et al., Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics, 2014; Fang et al., Cell Reports, 2014).

The long-term goal of Dr. Weirauch's lab is to create an accurate computational system for predicting TF and RNA binding protein interactions with the genome/transcriptome, and for understanding the effects of genetic variations on these interactions. As it continues to mature, they are applying this system to predict the effects of genetic variants that are strongly associated with several human diseases. Long-term, they envision that this system will be used for personalized medicine-based approaches – given the genome sequence of a patient, it will produce a prioritized list of genetic variants likely to contribute to disease onset via alterations to protein binding events.

Education and Training

Hide

Postdoctoral Fellow: University of Toronto (Donnelly Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Research), Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

PhD: Bioinformatics, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California.

BSc: Computer Science, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

Publications

Hide

View PubMed Publications

Weirauch M, Yang A, Albu M, Cote A, Montenegro-Montero A, Drewe P, Najafabadi H, Lambert S, Mann I, Cook K, Zheng H, Goity A, van Bakel H, Lozano J, Galli M, Lewsey M, Huang E, Mukherjee T, Chen X, Reece-Hoyes J, Govindarajan S, Shaulsky G, Walhout AJM, Bouget F, Ratsch G, Larrondo L, Ecker J, Hughes T. Determination and inference of eukaryotic transcription factor sequence specificity. Cell. 2014 Sep 11;158(6):1431-1443.

Makashir S, Kottyan L, Weirauch M. Meta-analysis of Differential Gene Co-expression: Application to Lupus. Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. 2014.

Kottyan L, Davis B, Sherrill J, Lui K, Rochman M, Kaufman K, Weirauch M, Vaughn S, Lazaro S, Rupert A, Kohram M, Stucke E, Kemme K, Magnusen A, He H, Dexheimer P, Mukkada V, Putnam P, Strauss A, Abonia JP, Martin L, Harley J, Rothenberg M. Genome-wide association analysis of eosinophilic esophagitis provides insight into the tissue specificity of this allergic disease. Nat Genet. 2014 Aug;46(8):895-900.

Sullivan A, Arsovski A, Lempe J, Bubb K, Weirauch M, et al. Mapping and Dynamics of Regulatory DNA and Transcription Factor Networks in A. thaliana. Cell Reports. 2014 Sep 10.

Kottyan L, Zoller E, Bene J, Lu X, Kelly J, Rupert A, Lessard C, Vaughn S, Marion M, Weirauch M, et al. The IRF5-TNPO3 association with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) has two components that other autoimmune disorders variably share. Hum Mol Genet. 2014 Sep 8.

Weirauch M, Cote A, Norel R, Annala M, Zhao Y, Riley T, Saez-Rodriguez J, Cokelaer T, Vedenko A, Talukder S, DREAM5 Consortium, et al. Evaluation of methods for modeling transcription factor sequence specificity. Nature Biotechnology. 2013 Jan 27;31(2):126-34.

Ray D*, Kazan H*, Cook K*, Weirauch M*, Najafabadi H*, Li X, Gueroussov S, Albu M, Zheng H, Yang A, Na H, Irimia M, Matzat L, Dale R, Smith S, Yarosh C, Kelly S, Nabet B, Mecenas D, Li W, Laishram R, Qiao M, Lipshitz H, Piano F, Corbett A, Carstens R, Frey B, Anderson R, Lynch K, Penalva L, Lei E, Fraser A, Blencowe B, Morris Q, Hughes T. A compendium of RNA binding motifs for decoding gene regulation. Nature. 2013 Jul 10;499(7457):172-177. *co-first authors.

Costanzo M, Baryshnikova A, Bellay J, Kim Y, Spear E, Sevier C, Ding H, Koh J, Toufighi K, Mostafavi S, Prinz J, St Onge R, VanderSluis B, Makhnevych T, Vizeacoumar F, Alizadeh S, Bahr S, Brost R, Chen Y, Cokol M, Deshpande R, Li Z, Lin Z, Liang W, Marback M, Paw J, San Luis B, Shuteriqi E, Tong A, van Dyk N, Wallace I, Whitney J, Weirauch M, Zhong G, Zhu H, Houry W, Brudno M, Ragibizadeh S, Papp B, Pál C, Roth F, Giaever G, Nislow C, Troyanskaya O, Bussey H, Bader G, Gingras A, Morris Q, Kim P, Kaiser C, Myers C, Andrews B, Boone C. The genetic landscape of a cell. Science. 2010 Jan 22;327(5964):425-31.

Byrne A, Weirauch M, Wong V, Koeva M, Dixon S, Stuart J, Roy P. A global analysis of genetic interactions in Caenorhabditis elegans. J Biol. 2007;6(3):8.

ENCODE Project Consortium. Identification and analysis of functional elements in 1% of the human genome by the ENCODE pilot project. Nature. 2007 Jun 14;447(7146):799-816.

Grants

Hide

Viral transcription factor interactions with disease-associated genetic variants. Principal Investigator. Trustee Award, Cincinnati Children's. Jul 2014-Jun 2016.

Translational Genomics Analysis Core. Co-Investigator. NIH/NCRR CCTST T1 Pilot, Cincinnati Children's. Jul 2014-Jun 2016.

Decoding C2H2 Zinc Fingers. Collaborator. Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Operating Grant. Oct 2013-Sep 2016.