Tyler Faits

Ph.D. Candidate, Bioinformatics, BUSM
Johnson Lab

Education

B.S. Biology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 2010

Contact Information

Email: tfaits@gmail.com

Research Interests

Metatranscriptomics

I am creating and developing tools to examine the full transcriptome of the human microbiome. The complex microbial communities that live within and upon us encode hundreds of thousands of genes, and have significant impact on human health. In addition to exploring the taxonomic makeup of these communities through metagenomics, I use full RNA-seq data to extrapolate the relative activity level and gene expression of species.

Single-cell RNA-seq analysis

I am developing statistical methods for analyzing transcriptomic data from single cells. Single-cell RNA-seq allows us to identify novel subtypes of human cells, gain a deeper understanding of the driving forces of cancer, and explore the nature of transcriptional regulation. However, scRNA-seq is prone to high levels of technical error and biological noise which must be accounted for when performing differential expression analyses.

Publications

Genesis and growth of extracellular-vesicle-derived microcalcification in atherosclerotic plaques. Hutcheson J, Goettsch C, Bertazzo S, Maldonado N, Ruiz J, Goh W, Yabusaki K, Faits T, Bouten C, Franck G, Quillard T, Libby P, Aikawa M, Weinbaum S, & Aikawa E. Nature Materials, 2016. doi:10.1038/nmat4519

Angiopoitin-Like Protein 2 (ANGPTL2) promotes adipose tissue macrophage and T lymphocyte accumulation and leads to insulin resistance. Sasaki Y, Ohta M, Desai D, Figueiredo JL, Whelan MC, Sugano T, Yamabi M, Yano W, Faits T, Yabusaki K, Zhang H, Mlynarchik AK, Inoue K,Mizuno K, Aikawa M (2015). PLoS ONE 07/2015; 10(7). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0131176