Our Science – Lautenberger Website

James Lautenberger, Ph.D.

Laboratory of Genomic Diversity Staff Scientist Bldg. 560, Room 21-79 Frederick, MD 21702 Phone:   301-846-5296 Fax:   301-846-1686 E-Mail:   lauten@ncifcrf.gov

Biography

Dr. Lautenberger received his B.S. degree from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. In the laboratory of Dr. Stuart Linn at Berkeley, he characterized the DNA modification methylase from Escherichia coli B. He then received postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill under Drs. Marshall Edgell and Clyde Hutchison III. There he and coworkers elucidated the recognition sequence of the E. coli B and K12 restriction endonucleases. Dr. Lautenberger joined the laboratory of Dr. Takis Papas at the National Cancer Institute in 1979. His accomplishments there include the molecular cloning of the v-myc oncogene from the MC29 avian myelocytomatosis virus and the development of a highly efficient bacterial expression vector. This vector allowed the efficient production of a segment of the human T-cell leukemia (lymphotropic) retrovirus (HTLV-1) envelope protein facilitating the development of an assay for detecting viral contamination of the blood supply. Additionally, Dr. Lautenberger and Dr. Zhang-qun Chen determined that antisense oligonucleotides for the ETS1 proto-oncogene inhibit vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) induced endothelial cell migration. This finding suggests a role for this proto-oncogene in angiogenesis. After serving as the Acting Chief of the NCI Laboratory of Molecular Oncology from 1993 to 1996, Dr. Lautenberger joined Dr. Stephen O'Brien's NCI Laboratory of Genomic Diversity. There, working with Dr. O'Brien and Drs. Michael Smith and J. Claiborne Stephens, he determined that there is significant admixture linkage disequilibrium across 30 cM around the FY (Duffy blood group antigen) locus in African Americans. This demonstrates the feasibility of using African Americans as a population for disease gene mapping by admixture linkage disequilibrium (MALD). Dr. Lautenberger subsequently contributed to the development of short tandem repeat polymorphism (STRP) and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) marker panels to further the MALD method.

Research

Dr. Lautenberger's primary research interest is in the relationship between genotypes and susceptibility to disease or to infection with viruses. Since technology has recently been developed to economically produce large genotypic data sets such as whole genome association scans, he is especially interested in developing computer programs that can efficiently process such data. One of his programs, ARG Analysis, performs analyses of potential associations between genotypes and HIV-1 infection or progression to AIDS. This program can process SNP genotypic data or haplotypic data formatted as biallelic genotypes. Dr. Lautenberger is also interested in methods for the visualization of the analysis results from large association studies. His ARG Highway program displays the significance of associations as blocks whose heights are proportional on a logarithmic scale to P-values. The color of each block signifies the strength of an association as measured by the hazard or odds ratio. Another of his programs, ARG Tracks, produces a report providing detailed analysis results for a particular marker.

Dr. Lautenberger has also developed a set of programs that efficiently analyze genotypes from large case-control studies. Starting with a data set in the simple 'prettybase' format, his programs can efficiently compute association statistics as well as measures of population divergence and consistency with Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. A complete analysis of a data set containing over 200 million genotypes can be performed in about an hour and a half on a high performance computer.

This page was last updated on 7/15/2008.