Jayna Nicholas, a graduate student in the Genetics and Molecular Biology (GMB) curriculum, has been awarded a National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Predoctoral Fellowship (F31) from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), for her project titled “Cross-Ancestry Comparison of Aptamer and Antibody Proteomics Measures”.
Jayna Nicolas is a fourth year PhD student in the labs of Dr. Laura Raffield and Dr. Karen Mohlke in the Department of Genetics. Under this award, she will systematically assess two new affinity-based high-throughput proteomics platforms (SomaScan and Olink) that evaluate circulating protein biomarkers. These platforms are commonly used in emerging studies of Cardiovascular Disease (CVD). CVD is the leading cause of death in the United States, yet drivers of disease and risk markers remain poorly characterized. The SomaScan and Olink affinity-based high-throughput proteomics platforms offer unprecedented opportunities to study CVD disease mechanisms and to search for new clinical biomarkers of disease. However, initial comparisons of these two leading proteomics platforms suggest that at least one-third of protein measures correlate poorly between platforms, resulting in platform-specific or platform-discordant genetic and epidemiological associations, which may confound biological interpretation of results across studies. Therefore, the work outlined in her aims will assess the agreement of protein measures from each of these two proteomics platforms and use genetic analyses to predict assay reliability. The results of this analysis will disentangle reproducible protein measures and association results from those likely reflecting genetically-driven assay interference, within and across populations, and present new strategies to harmonize downstream associations for the impacted proteins across platforms.