New statistical approaches to mapping the functional impact of HLA alleles in multimodal complex disease datasets

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HLA alleles are associated with a range of immune-mediated traits. This project aims to combine skills in genetics, programming, statistics and integration of multimodal data in order to understand the functional impacts of these disease-associated HLA alleles. Recent developments of multimodal single-cell functional genomics offer new opportunities to understand the impact of HLA alleles at single cell resolution. In this project, we will develop new statistical techniques, such as high-dimensional Gaussian processes, to analyse multimodal data to understand the impact of HLA alleles on cellular phenotype.We will apply these methods to existing multi-modal single-cell data from infectious disease patients, and to microbiome and gene expression in intestinal biopsies of inflammatory bowel disease patients. In both cases, the aim is to determine the functional impact of HLA alleles in specific biological contexts.