Skip to content

Atkinson Lab

Summary

The Atkinson Lab is led by Elizabeth G. Atkinson in the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine. The group develops statistical genetics methods for including admixed and related individuals in genome-wide association studies, including Tractor and its relatedness-aware extension Tractor-Mix.

Research Focus

  • Admixture-aware GWAS methods: local-ancestry-informed association testing that produces ancestry-specific effect sizes and P values (Tractor, Tractor-Mix).
  • Extending methods to related samples: mixed-model frameworks that jointly handle genetic admixture and sample relatedness, validated on cohorts including the UK Biobank, the Mexico City Prospective Study, and the Yale-Penn Cohort.

Citations

[1] Tan, T., Vergara-Lope, A., Martínez-Magaña, J.J. et al. (2025). Extending Genome-Wide Association Studies to admixed cohorts with high degrees of relatedness. medRxiv preprint. DOI: 10.1101/2025.05.27.25328444. Source: 2025.05.27.25328444v1.full.md. Corresponding author: Elizabeth G. Atkinson.

[2] Atkinson, E. G. et al. (2021). Tractor uses local ancestry to enable the inclusion of admixed individuals in GWAS and to boost power. Nature Genetics, 53, 195–204. DOI: 10.1038/s41588-020-00766-y. Not independently inspected in full; listed as prior work by the same corresponding author per [1].