Research

With the advance of array/sequencing techniques and the accumulation of different types of genomic data, the study of a living organism in system level has become feasible and necessary. Such genomic data may include genome-wide DNA polymorphism (e.g., genotypes of thousands to millions of SNPs, DNA copy number variations), epigenetic information (e.g., nucleosome occupancy, histone modification), mRNA/miRNA expression, protein abundance/phosphorylation, and protein-protein interaction, as well as phenotype data. My research focus on analyzing such comprehensive genomic data, and their associations or casual relations with complex traits, such as human cancer.

 

Curriculum Vita

 

Selected Publications

QTL/eQTL (Expression Quantitative Trait Loci)
1. Wei Sun, Tianwei Yu, and Ker-Chau Li (2007), Detection of eQTL modules mediated by activity levels of transcription factors, Bioinformatics, 23(17), 2290-2297.
2. Wei Sun*, Shinsheng Yuan*, and Ker-Chau Li (2008), Trait-trait dynamic interaction: 2D-trait eQTL mapping for genetic variation study, BMC Genomics 2008, 9:242. (*Authors contribute equally)
3. Wei Sun, Joseph G. Ibrahim, and Fei Zou (2010), Genome-wide Multiple Loci Mapping in Experimental Crosses by the Iterative Adaptive Penalized Regression, Genetics, Vol. 185, 349-359. Download pdf
4. Wei Sun and Fred A. Wright, (2010), A geometric interpretation of the permutation p-value and its application in eQTL studies, Annals of Applied Statistics, 4(2), 1014-1033. Download pdf
5. Wei Sun and Lexin Li, (2012), Model-free Variable Selection for Small-n-Large-p Regressions, with Application to Genome-wide Multiple Loci Mapping, Biometrics, 2012 Mar;68(1):12-22 Epub 2011 Aug 12. Download pdf
6. Fred Wright, Patrick Sullivan, Andrew Brooks, Fei Zou, Wei Sun et al. (2014) Heritability and genomics of gene expression in peripheral blood, Nature Genetics, 46(5), 430-437.
7. Wei Sun (2012), A Statistical Framework for eQTL Mapping Using RNA-seq Data, Biometrics, 2012 Mar;68(1):1-11 Epub 2011 Aug 12. Download pdf         Download data and results         Slides
8. Wei Sun and Yijuan Hu (2013), eQTL mapping using RNA-seq data, Statistics in Biosciences, 2013 May;5(1):198-219. Download pdf
9. Yijuan Hu, Jung-Ying Tzeng, Charles M. Perou, and Wei Sun (2014), Proper Use of Allele-Specific Expression Improves Statistical Power for cis-eQTL Mapping with RNA-Seq Data, Manuscript A list of 2,509 eQTLs
 
RNA-seq
1. Calabrese JM, Sun W, Song L, Mugford J, Williams L, Yee D, Starmer J, Mieczkowski P, Crawford G, Magnuson T (2012) Site-specific silencing of regulatory elements as a mechanism of X-inactivation. Cell, 2012 Nov 21;151(5):951-63.
2. James J Crowley*, Vasyl Zhabotynsky*, Wei Sun*, ..., Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena (2013) Pervasive Allelic Imbalance Revealed By Allele-Specific Gene Expression In Highly Divergent Mouse Crosses, Nature Genetics, in revision
 
Epigenetic Studies
1. Wei Sun, Michael J Buck, Mukund Patel, and Ian J Davis (2009), Improved ChIP-chip analysis by mixture model approach, BMC bioinformatics, 10:173
2. Wei Sun*, Wei Xie*, Feng Xu, Michael Grunstein, Ker-Chau Li (2009), Dissecting Nucleosome Free Regions by a Segmental Semi-Markov Model, PLoS One, 4(3):e4721, (*Authors contribute equally)
3. Naim Rashid, Paul Giresi, Joe Ibrahim, Wei Sun*, Jason Lieb* (2011) ZINBA integrates local covariates with DNA-seq data to identify broad and narrow regions of enrichment, even within amplified genomic regions, Genome Biology, 12(7):R67,
4. Naim Rashid, Wei Sun, Joe Ibrahim (2014), Some Statistical Strategies for DAE-seq Data Analysis: Variable Selection and Modeling Dependencies among Observations, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 109(505):78-94
 
Copy Number Study
1. Tianwei Yu, Hui Ye, Wei Sun, Ker-Chau Li, Zugen Chen, Sharoni Jacobs, Dione K Bailey, David T Wong and Xiaofeng Zhou, (2007), A forward-backward fragment assembling algorithm for the identification of amplification and deletion breakpoints using high-density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array, BMC bioinformatics, 8:145
2. Wei Sun, Fred Wright, Zhengzheng Tang, Silje H. Nordgard, Peter Van Loo, Tianwei Yu, Vessela Kristensen, and Charles Perou (2009), Integrated study of copy number states and genotype calls using high density SNP arrays, Nucleic Acid Research, 37(16):5365-77 Download pdf     Supplemenatry Materials
3. Van Loo P, Nordgard SH, Lingjærde OC, Russnes HG, Rye IH, Sun W, Weigman VJ, Marynen P, Zetterberg A, Naume B, Perou CM, Børresen-Dale AL, and Kristensen VN. (2010), Allele-specific copy number analysis of tumors. PNAS, 107(39):16910-5
4. Szatkiewicz JP, Wang W, Sullivan PF, Wang W, Sun W (2013), Improving detection of copy-number variation by simultaneous bias correction and read-depth segmentation. Nucleic Acids Research, 1;41(3):1519-32