Download Jessica C. Mar, Ph.D.

Jessica C. Mar, Ph.D.
Positions:
Assistant Professor, Department of Systems & Computational Biology
Assistant Professor, Department of Epidemiology & Population Health
Research interests:
The focus of the Mar lab is to understand how variability in biological signals, such as gene expression
affects the regulatory capacity and plasticity of gene networks and the downstream consequences for
phenotype. We are interested in exploring the link between transcriptional variability and models of
incomplete penetrance. Early evidence, from our lab and others, supports the importance of variability as a
window into studying diversity in normal human populations, with potential implications for disease
processes.
Current grant funding:
None.
Five recent publications:
1.
Mar JC, Matigian NA, Mackay-Sim A, Miotto A, Mellick G, Sue C, Silburn P, McGrath J, Quackenbush J,
Wells CA. (2011). Variance of gene expression identifies altered network constraints in neurological
disease. PLoS Genetics. Aug;7(8):e1002207 [paper].
2.
Mar JC, Matigian NA, Quackenbush J, Wells CA. (2011). attract: A method for identifying core pathways
that define cell phenotypes. PLoS One. 6(10):e25445. [paper]
3.
Mar JC, Wells CA, Quackenbush J#. (2011). Defining an Informativeness Metric for Clustering Gene
Expression Data. Bioinformatics. Feb 16. [paper]
4.
Divergent reprogramming routes lead to alternative stem-cell states. Tonge PD, Corso AJ, Monetti C,
Hussein SM, Puri MC, Michael IP, Li M, Lee DS, Mar JC, Cloonan N, Wood DL, Gauthier ME, Korn O,
Clancy JL, Preiss T, Grimmond SM, Shin JY, Seo JS, Wells CA, Rogers IM, Nagy A. Nature. 2014 Dec
11;516(7530):192-7. doi: 10.1038/nature14047.
5.
Gene expression variability as a unifying element of the pluripotency network. Mason EA, Mar JC,
Laslett AL, Pera MF, Quackenbush J, Wolvetang E, Wells CA. Stem Cell Reports. 2014 Aug 12;3(2):36577. doi: 10.1016/j.stemcr.2014.06.008. Epub 2014 Jul 25.