Fred Wright

About

Fred Wright, Ph.D., is the Director of the Bioinformatics Research Center at North Carolina State University and holds the title of Goodnight Innovation Distinguished Professor of Statistics and Biological Sciences. He is based in 306 Ricks Hall and can be contacted via email at fred_wright@ncsu.edu. The page text does not provide further details about his specific research focus, background, or key contributions.

Research topics

• Biology
• Genetics
• Computational biology
• Pathology
• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Organic chemistry
• Geography
• Cell biology
• Engineering

Selected publications

• The GTEx Consortium atlas of genetic regulatory effects across human tissues

  Science · 2020 · 5682 citations

  The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project was established to characterize genetic effects on the transcriptome across human tissues and to link these regulatory mechanisms to trait and disease associations. Here, we present analyses of the version 8 data, examining 15,201 RNA-sequencing samples from 49 tissues of 838 postmortem donors. We comprehensively characterize genetic associations for gene expression and splicing in cis and trans, showing that regulatory associations are found for alm…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The impact of sex on gene expression across human tissues

  Science · 2020 · 703 citations

  Many complex human phenotypes exhibit sex-differentiated characteristics. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying these differences remain largely unknown. We generated a catalog of sex differences in gene expression and in the genetic regulation of gene expression across 44 human tissue sources surveyed by the Genotype-Tissue Expression project (GTEx, v8 release). We demonstrate that sex influences gene expression levels and cellular composition of tissue samples across the human body. A t…

  DOI

• Cell type–specific genetic regulation of gene expression across human tissues

  Science · 2020 · 583 citations

  The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project has identified expression and splicing quantitative trait loci in cis (QTLs) for the majority of genes across a wide range of human tissues. However, the functional characterization of these QTLs has been limited by the heterogeneous cellular composition of GTEx tissue samples. We mapped interactions between computational estimates of cell type abundance and genotype to identify cell type-interaction QTLs for seven cell types and show that cell type-…

  DOI

• Determinants of telomere length across human tissues

  Science · 2020 · 486 citations

  Telomere shortening is a hallmark of aging. Telomere length (TL) in blood cells has been studied extensively as a biomarker of human aging and disease; however, little is known regarding variability in TL in nonblood, disease-relevant tissue types. Here, we characterize variability in TLs from 6391 tissue samples, representing >20 tissue types and 952 individuals from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project. We describe differences across tissue types, positive correlation among tissue typ…

  DOI

• Transcriptomic signatures across human tissues identify functional rare genetic variation

  Science · 2020 · 162 citations

  Rare genetic variants are abundant across the human genome, and identifying their function and phenotypic impact is a major challenge. Measuring aberrant gene expression has aided in identifying functional, large-effect rare variants (RVs). Here, we expanded detection of genetically driven transcriptome abnormalities by analyzing gene expression, allele-specific expression, and alternative splicing from multitissue RNA-sequencing data, and demonstrate that each signal informs unique classes of R…

  DOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01HG009125

  NIH · $791k · 2020

• Graduate Training in Bioinformatics

  NIH · $6.6M · 2000–2028

• NIH Grant R01MH101819

  NIH · $1.3M · 2017

Frequent coauthors

• Ivan Rusyn

  Texas A&M University

  90 shared

• Yi‐Hui Zhou

  Yahoo (United Kingdom)

  64 shared

• Ralf Krahe

  The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

  63 shared

• Andrew B. Nobel

  47 shared

• Michael R. Knowles

  Lung Institute

  45 shared

• Weihsueh A. Chiu

  Texas A&M University

  42 shared

• Fei Zou

  Shandong University of Technology

  42 shared

• Bo Yuan

  Baylor Genetics

  41 shared

Labs

• NCSU Bioinformatics Research CenterPI

  Bioinformatics and Statistical Genetics

Awards & honors

• 2023 ASM Microbiome Data Prize

Similar researchers at North Carolina State University

• Zhao-Bang Zengh-44
• Gavin Conanth-38
• Xinxia Pengh-34