Dr. Grant’s research programme is focused on statistical genomics methods applied to the understanding of chronic pain development, pain sensitivity and conditions featuring pain. Pain phenotypes implicate both the nervous system and immunity. Dr. Grant’s laboratory uses classical and novel methods in the analysis of large, publicly available clinical databases combined with other tissue-specific expression or epigenetics sources, towards an integrative genomics to characterize the genetic architecture of pain phenotypes. The goal is to glean new information on the pathophysiological implications of this genetic architecture, and to uncover the common genetic basis of pain-related phenotypes with other traits.

Publications:

Ao X, Parisien M, Grant AV, Zidan M, Martinsen AE, Winsvold BS, Diatchenko L. Rare variant analyses in large-scale cohorts identified SLC12A1 associated with chronic pain. Pain. 2023 Aug 1;164(8):1841-1851.

Parisien M, Grant AV, Muralidharan A, Diatchenko L, Mogil J. Chronic pain and premature mortality in men and women, using data from UK Biobank. J Clin Invest. 2023 Mar 1;133(5):e168070.

Wang Y, Grant AV, Li Y. Implementation of a graph-embedded topic model for analysis of population-level electronic health records. STAR Protoc. 2022 Dec 28;4(1):101966.

Parisien M, Lima LV, Dagostino C, El-Hachem N, Drury GL, Grant AV, Huising J, Verma V, Meloto CB, Silva JR, Dutra GGS, Markova T, Dang H, Tessier PA, Slade GD, Nackley AG, Ghasemlou N, Mogil JS, Allegri M, Diatchenko L, Acute Inflammatory Response via Neutrophil Activation Protects Against Pain Chronification. Sci Transl Med. 2022 May 11;14(644).

Wang Y, Benavides R, Diatchenko L, Grant AV,* Li Y* A graph-embedded topic model enables characterization of diverse pain phenotypes among UK Biobank individuals iScience. 2022 May 12;25(6):104390. *equal contribution

Ben-Eghan C, Sun R, Hleap JS, Diaz-Papkovich A, Munter HM, Grant AV, Dupras C, Gravel S. Don’t ignore genetic data from minority populations. Nature. 2020 Sep;585(7824):184-186.

Grant AV*, Loucoubar C*, Bureau JF, Casademont I, Bar NA, Bar-Hen A, Diop M, Faye J, Sarr FD, Badiane A, Tall A, Trape JF, Cliquet F, Schwikowski B, Lathrop M, Paul RE, Sakuntabhai A. (2017) Detecting multi-way epistasis in family-based association studies. Brief Bioinform. May 1;18(3):394-402.
*equal contribution