Elizabeth A Mason
My project tests the hypothesis that variance within biological populations describes an important, but until now hidden predictor of cellular behaviour and phenotype. Phenotypic heterogeneity in clonally derived cell populations is ubiquitous, and mask biologically relevant information is often masked by using population-averaging techniques, versus individual cell based measurements. I am currently developing new network approaches which incorporate gene expression variance, and in doing so I aim to identify the genetic elements which stabilize a cellular state, and push a cell to transition from a stem cell to a differentiated lineage. From this, I predict that cellular networks describing pluripotency, differentiation and human disease will exhibit measurable changes in expression variance, such that the variance of a population will be informative about the regulatory constraints on the disease network.
I first started working on population variance as a research assistant and laboratory manager with Professor Greg Gibson (Centre for Integrative Genomics, Georgia Tech University), who has a distinguished career in developmental genomics of Drosophila. Currently I am working as a research assitant in Martin Pera's lab for Stem Cells Australia, and with Christine Wells as part of the Stemformatics team.
Publications:
Hollins, S., Goldie, B.J, Carroll, A.P., Mason, E.A., Walker, F.R., Eyles, D.W., Cairns, M.J. (2014) Ontogeny of small RNA in the regulation of mammalian brain development. BMC Genomics 2014, 15:777 (9 September 2014)
Mason, E., Mar, J.C., Laslett, A.L., Pera, M.F., Quackenbush, J., Wolvetang, E.J., Wells, C.A. (2014) Gene expression variability as a unifying element of the pluripotency network. Stem Cell Reports. Vol. 3. 1-13.
Hough, S.R., Thornton, M., Mason, E.A., Mar, J.C., Wells, C.A., Pera, M.F. (2014) Single-cell gene expression profiles define self-renewing, pluripotent and lineage primed states of human pluripotent stem cells. Stem Cell Reports. Vol. 6. 881-95.
Carlos Polanco J, Ho MS, Wang B, Zhou Q, Wolvetang E, Mason E, Wells CA, Kolle G, Grimmond SM, Bertoncello I, O'Brien C, Laslett AL. (2013). Identification of Unsafe Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines Using a Robust Surrogate Assay for Pluripotency. Stem Cells.
Briggs JA, Mason EA, Ovchinnikov DA, Wells CA, Wolvetang EJ. (2013). Concise review: new paradigms for Down syndrome research using induced pluripotent stem cells: tackling complex human genetic disease. Stem Cells Translational Medicine. (3)175:184.
Mason, E., Tronc, G., Nones, K., Matigian, N., Kim, J., Aronow, B., Wolfinger, R., Wells, C., Gibson, G. (2010). Maternal Influences on the Transmission of Leukocyte Gene Expression Profiles in Population Samples from Brisbane, Australia. PLoS ONE 5(12).