Longer-form write-ups of what comes out of the lab: what a pre-print or paper shows, why we built a tool the way we did, and what we are still working out. Each post links to related social media posts and papers/pre-prints.

MacBook laptop showing KaryoScope actively running alongside the final output karyotype plots

Excited to share a big KaryoScope update this past week: the HKS k-mer backend is now integrated, and you can build databases for any features of interest. The complete Human Pangenome Reference Consortium HG002 assembly (~6.3 Gbp) now annotates in 21 minutes on a MacBook Pro.

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Two multicolor FISH karyograms of crisis cells

Telomere crisis is an engine of genomic instability, driving the structural evolution of cancer genomes. Our new preprint finds this damage isn’t random: it converges on the nucleolus and the chromosomes that build it.

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KaryoScope karyotype of the HG002 diploid assembly. All 22 autosomes plus X and Y, each shown as paired haplotypes (h1, h2). Each chromosome has a full-length track colored by chromosome of origin, a centromere zoom panel showing satellite composition, and a subtelomere zoom panel. Legends map chromosomes, satellite families, and subtelomeric features to colors.

The human genome’s most variable and clinically important regions (centromeres, telomeres, and acrocentric short arms) have been the hardest to study at scale. Thrilled to share KaryoScope, our new preprint that brings them within reach.

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Side-by-side computational and traditional multi-color karyotype for HG008T

Excited to contribute to a new preprint led by Justin Zook and the NIST/GIAB team: “A complete human pancreatic cancer genome”, the first near-complete, haplotype-resolved tumor cell line assembly (HG008-T, hypodiploid PDAC).

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