Student

Deepro Banerjee

Graduate Student

Adviser: Santhosh Girirajan

Email dzb5732@psu.edu

Bioinformatics and Genomics IGDP

Researchers have developed a new framework to study the functional impact of genetic background on the expression and severity of neurodevelopmental features associated with a deletion of a portion of chromosome 16. The research team used induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) derived from patients with the deletion, their families and a healthy donor that they differentiated into different types of neuronal cells — image shows immunostained iPSC-derived neurons on the left and iPSC-derived neural progenitor cells on the right — to study how interactions among a patient’s entire genetic architecture and the deletion help determine the features that the individual will manifest. Credit: Girirajan Laboratory / Penn State. Creative Commons

May 05, 2026

How can the same genetic mutation lead to different clinical outcomes?

October 31, 2025

Massive cross-ancestry study explains why obesity risks differ around the world

$A new study involving about 850,000 adults across six continental ancestries, has identified 13 genes associated with obesity across ancestries. While eight of these genes had been found in previous studies, five were identified for the first time, having no previous links to obesity. The colors of the DNA helix in the image represent ancestral difference in genetic background around the world. The black figures represent people who do not carry gene mutations found to be associated with obesity while the red figures carry them. The fraction of red and black figures highlights the differences in genetic mutations across the world. Credit: Deepro Banerjee, Girirajan Laboratory / Penn State. Creative Commons$

October 30, 2025

Genes associated with obesity shared across ancestries, researchers find

New research helps explain why disease-associated genetic variants can lead to variable clinical outcomes, influenced both by the patterns of secondary variants, or genetic background, and by how cohorts of individuals in a study are ascertained. In a family, shown on left, secondary variants can influence the severity of clinical outcomes, which is indicated by intensity of blue shading, or which features are present between a parent and a child that both carry the primary variant. However, this relationship between secondary and primary variants is different if the primary variant was discovered in a biobank that includes mostly healthy individuals, in the middle, or people identified for a shared clinical feature, on right. Credit: Corrine Smolen/Girirajan Laboratory / Penn State. Creative Commons

October 07, 2025

Background genetic variants influence clinical features in complex disorders

New research finds sex-specific regions of the brain can relieve the detrimental effects of chronic stress in male and female mice. Left: Schematic showing a cortical microcircuit with three types of interneurons expressing somatostatin (SST), parvalbumin (PV) or vasointestinal peptide (VIP) and their distinct patterns of innervation of glutamatergic output neurons (PNs), with thin lines representing axons that send chemical signals and the thicker lines of PNs representing dendrites that receive information. There is selective innervation of the distal ends of PN dendrites by axons of SST neurons. Right: Increased activity of SST neurons by genetically induced disinhibition, on top right, or by chemogenetic activation of SST neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex, on bottom right, leads to stress resilience and facilitates the reversal of the detrimental behavioral effects of stress exposure in male but not female mice. Credit: Bernhard Lüscher / Penn State. Creative Commons

December 16, 2024

Brain regions that relieve effects of chronic stress in mice differ based on sex

Neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, and the genes that can lead to them, vary in a population. This is illustrated in the figure on the left, with brighter red colors represent more severe symptoms, asterisks represent individuals with genetic variants that convey high risk for developing such disorders. A new study that looked at 97,000 families observed assortative mating for these traits with good correlation between the traits in the parents, as illustrated in the middle figure. The researchers showed that evaluating both parents for these traits, in addition to the high-risk genetic variants, improved their ability to predict the prevalence and, potentially, severity of the disorders in children, illustrated on the right. Credit: Girirajan Laboratory / Penn State. Creative Commons

February 07, 2024

Predicting neurodevelopmental disease in children from parent’s traits

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