This started in 2019 as daydreamy PhD student musings with Tatsuya Araki. We're as excited as ever about germinal centers as a platform for experimental evolution. Many thanks to PIs @victora.bsky.social @matsen.bsky.social, co-1st authors Ashni Vora and Tatsuya, and many other key collaborators!

Replaying germinal center evolution on a quantified affinity landscape

Antibody affinity maturation results from a somatic evolutionary process that takes place in the germinal center. A “parallel replay” experiment on germinal center B cells reveals the evolutionary for...

cell.com

How much of the human genome is essential? Two pieces out today from our lab: 1) a method to map essential genomic intervals at gigabase scale, and 2) an argument that it's time to consider synthesizing a minimal human genome. biorxiv.org/content/10.6... nature.com/articles/d41...

Why a synthetic human genome is still worth building

A decade on from the launch of an ambitious project, it’s time to revisit the reasons for constructing a human genome from scratch.

nature.com

New preprint! 📣We performed the largest multi-ancestry GWAS of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), the most common autoimmune disease, by analyzing the VA Million Veteran Program (MVP) with international RA cohorts.

medRxivpreprint@medrxivpreprint.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Multi-ancestral GWAS with the VA Million Veteran Program enables functional interpretation of rheumatoid arthritis alleles https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.22.26351423v1

An important piece from my neighbor, colleague and friend Will DeWitt et al. @wsdewitt.github.io www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Open faculty position (Assistant or Associate) in UW Medical Genetics. As you might expect, faculty often end up also interacting with Genome Sciences, so we're hoping for some great prospects! Note the clinical requirements for the position. apply.interfolio.com/176466

First time on Bsky and first big announcement! I am excited to announce that our new study explaining the missing heritability of many phenotypes using WGS data from ~347,000 UK Biobank participants has just been published in @Nature. Our manuscript is here: www.nature.com/articles/s41....

Estimation and mapping of the missing heritability of human phenotypes - Nature

WGS data were used from 347,630 individuals with European ancestry in the UK Biobank to obtain high-precision estimates of coding and non-coding rare variant heritability for 34 co...

nature.com

I’ll be at #ashg2025 ! Please let me know if you want to chat with me about research, my lab at UW saorisakaue.github.io etc etc! I’ll also be standing at the poster session on Friday 5075F at 2:30-4p if you can swing by to chat👋

New paper from my lab and @jshendure.bsky.social lab! Led by the brilliant @zukailiu.bsky.social and @cxqiu.bsky.social. We tackled how anterior and posterior progenitor cells cooperate to self-organize into an embryonic structure (termed AP-gastruloid). (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📣Excited to share my last postdoc paper with @soumya-boston.bsky.social on eQTL mechanisms depending on where the RNA is in the cell! @broadinstitute.org @harvardmed.bsky.social TL;DR:Early RNA eQTL variants in the nucleus and late RNA eQTL variants in the cytosol have distinct molecular mechanism🧵

bioRxiv Genomics@biorxiv-genomic.bsky.social · last yr.

Early and late RNA eQTL are driven by different genetic mechanisms https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.24.639351v1

Excited to tell you about VIMA (Variational Inference-based Microniche Analysis), our deep learning + stats hybrid for case-control analysis of multi-sample spatial molecular datasets. 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @soumya-boston.bsky.social @broadinstitute.org

Powerful and accurate case-control analysis of spatial molecular data with deep learning-defined tissue microniches

As spatial molecular data grow in scope and resolution, there is a pressing need to identify key spatial structures associated with disease. Current approaches often rely on hand-crafted features such...

biorxiv.org