Yanmei Dou was born in Shandong, China. In 2017, she graduated from the Center for Bioinformatics in the School of Life Sciences, Peking University, with a doctorate in bioinformatics. From 2017 to 2021, she joined the Department of Biomedical Informatics of Harvard Medical School for post-doctoral research. Her major focus was to develop bioinformatics tools to accurately detect mosaic mutations, characterize mosaic mutations in non-cancer populations, use mosaic mutations to track human development processes, and explore the role of mosaic mutations in non-cancer human diseases. She would join the School of Life Sciences of Westlake University in 2021 as an assistant professor.

Dr. Dou’s research has mainly focused on developing bioinformatics methods to accurately detect mosaic point mutations & short indels from next generation sequencing data, characterizing mosaic mutations in non-cancer human genomes and using mosaic mutations to track human embryonic development. During the past few years, “MosaicForecast” she developed has been widely used to detect mosaic mutations from WGS data. She then characterized mosaic mutations in non-cancer individuals and revealed the prevalence of early-embryonic mosaic mutations in human genomes. In addition, she demonstrated that mosaic mutations could be used as endogenous markers to track human development in-vivo, revealed highly asymmetrical cell divisions during early embryonic development and that there are ~50-100 brain progenitor cells, etc. Her work has also shown that mosaic mutations contribute to ASD diagnosis.

Mosaic mutations have gained more and more attention due to their high occurrence rate in human genomes and their impacts in a set of cancer and non-cancer diseases. Recent studies revealed a profound impact of mosaic mutations on neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, but the prevalence and impact of early-developmental mosaics in most human diseases (including cancers) is still largely unknown. Our lab in Westlake University would focus on (but not restricted to) the following directions:

1.     Develop new methods to detect common and rare mosaic variants;

2.     Explore the mutation profiles at different stages of human development;

3.     Pan-cancer analysis of early-embryonic mosaic mutations;

4.     Explore the potential role of mosaic mutations in human diseases.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gu6x7LsAAAAJ&hl=zh-CN&oi=ao

*These authors contribute equally

1. Dou, Y., Kwon, M., Rodin, R. E., Cortes-Ciriano, I., Doan, R., Luquette, L. J., . . . Park, P. J. (2020). Accurate detection of mosaic variants in sequencing data without matched controls. Nat Biotechnol, 38(3), 314-319. doi:10.1038/s41587-019-0368-8

2. Bizzotto, S.*, Dou, Y.*, Ganz, J.*, Doan, R. N., Kwon, M., Bohrson, C. L., . . . Walsh, C. A. (2021). Landmarks of human embryonic development inscribed in somatic mutations. Science, 371(6535), 1249-1253. doi:10.1126/science.abe1544

3. Rodin, R. E. *, Dou, Y. *, Kwon, M., Sherman, M. A., D'Gama, A. M., Doan, R. N., . . . Walsh, C. A. (2021). The landscape of somatic mutation in cerebral cortex of autistic and neurotypical individuals revealed by ultra-deep whole-genome sequencing. Nat Neurosci. doi:10.1038/s41593-020-00765-6

4. Dou, Y. *, Gold, H. D. *, Luquette, L. J. *, & Park, P. J. (2018). Detecting Somatic Mutations in Normal Cells. Trends Genet, 34(7), 545-557. doi:10.1016/j.tig.2018.04.003

5. Ye, A. Y. *, Dou, Y. *, Yang, X., Wang, S., Huang, A. Y., & Wei, L. (2018). A model for postzygotic mosaicisms quantifies the allele fraction drift, mutation rate, and contribution to de novo mutations. Genome Res, 28(7), 943-951. doi:10.1101/gr.230003.117

6. Dou, Y., Yang, X., Li, Z., Wang, S., Zhang, Z., Ye, A. Y., . . . Wei, L. (2017). Postzygotic single-nucleotide mosaicisms contribute to the etiology of autism spectrum disorder and autistic traits and the origin of mutations. Hum Mutat, 38(8), 1002-1013. doi:10.1002/humu.23255

7. Huang, A. Y. *, Zhang, Z. *, Ye, A. Y. *, Dou, Y. *, Yan, L., Yang, X., . . . Wei, L. (2017). MosaicHunter: accurate detection of postzygotic single-nucleotide mosaicism through next-generation sequencing of unpaired, trio, and paired samples. Nucleic Acids Res, 45(10), e76. doi:10.1093/nar/gkx024

douyanmei@westlake.edu.cn

Our lab is primarily a computational biology group that develops and uses a wide range of genomic, bioinformatic, and statistical methods, but when desired, we would also do wet-lab experiments. We would work closely with hospitals to carry out a series of studies on (but not limited to) mosaic mutations. We aim at building a team of supportive and productive computational biologists and other members. Successful candidates will have the chance to work on the grand challenges of human genomics, somatic mutations, human development and precision medicine. We are always looking for new group members with passion, talent, and grit! See more details here on our Lab Website: https://douymlab.github.io/positions/