My name is Karen Garcia. I am a second-year student majoring in Molecular, Cell,
and Developmental Biology. I am a part of Dr. Xia Yang’s lab which focuses on
understanding the molecular networks that underlie cardiometabolic diseases, the
factors that contribute to their development, and how these diseases are
interconnected to each other as well as to a broad variety of other diseases. As a
member of this lab, I work with my graduate student mentor on our Toxicogenomics
project. For this project, we make use of transcriptome datasets and re-analyze them
using computational tools like R and Hoffman2 as well as pipelines such as LIMMA
and DESeq2 to analyze microarray and RNAseq data. We obtain this data from a
public genomics data repository called the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and
analyze it to help us understand how different chemicals affect gene expression.