Biomedical subjects

Mathew J Koretsky

Publications and source records attributed to Mathew J Koretsky.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2026

Parkinson Disease Pathogenic Variants: Cross-Ancestry Analysis and Microarray Data Validation.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Known pathogenic variants (PVs) in Parkinson disease (PD) contribute to disease development but have yet to be fully explored by arrays on a large scale. This study evaluated genotyping success of the NeuroBooster array (NBA) and determined the frequencies of PVs across ancestries. METHODS: We analyzed the presence and allele frequency of PVs in 28,710 PD cases, 9,614 other neurodegenerative disorder cases, and 15,821 controls across 11 ancestries within the Global Parkinson's Genetics Program (GP2) data set. Cluster plots were used to assess the quality of PVs genotyped on NBA. RESULTS: Genes previously predicted to have high or very high confidence of causing PD tend to have more PVs and are present across ancestry groups. Of 34 known PD gene PVs assessed, 25 were typed by NBA and classified as "good" (n = 12), "medium" (n = 4), or "bad" (n = 9) quality variants. DISCUSSION: Our results confirm the likelihood that established PD genes are pathogenic and highlight the importance of ancestrally diverse research in PD. We also show the usefulness of the NBA as a reliable tool for the genotyping of rare variants of PD.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2025

BiomedSQL: Text-to-SQL for Scientific Reasoning on Biomedical Knowledge Bases.

Biomedical researchers increasingly rely on large-scale structured databases for complex analytical tasks. However, current text-to-SQL systems often struggle to map qualitative scientific questions into executable SQL, particularly when implicit domain reasoning is required. We introduce BiomedSQL, the first benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate scientific reasoning in text-to-SQL generation over a real-world biomedical knowledge base. BiomedSQL comprises 68,000 question/SQL query/answer triples generated from templates and grounded in a harmonized BigQuery knowledge base that integrates gene-disease associations, causal inference from omics data, and drug approval records. Each question requires models to infer domain-specific criteria, such as genome-wide significance thresholds, effect directionality, or trial phase filtering, rather than rely on syntactic translation alone. We evaluate a range of open- and closed-source LLMs across prompting strategies and interaction paradigms. Our results reveal a substantial performance gap: GPT-o3-mini achieves 59.0% execution accuracy, while our custom multi-step agent, BMSQL, reaches 62.6%, both well below the expert baseline of 90.0%. BiomedSQL provides a new foundation for advancing text-to-SQL systems capable of supporting scientific discovery through robust reasoning over structured biomedical knowledge bases. Our dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/NIH-CARD/BiomedSQL, and our code is open-source at https://github.com/NIH-CARD/biomedsql.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2025

CNV-Finder: Streamlining Copy Number Variation Discovery.

Copy Number Variations (CNVs) play pivotal roles in the etiology of complex diseases and are variable across diverse populations. Understanding the association between CNVs and disease susceptibility is significant in disease genetics research and often requires analysis of large sample sizes. One of the most cost-effective and scalable methods for detecting CNVs is based on normalized signal intensity values, such as Log R Ratio (LRR) and B Allele Frequency (BAF), from Illumina genotyping arrays. In this study, we present CNV-Finder, a novel pipeline integrating deep learning techniques on array data, specifically a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, to expedite the large-scale identification of CNVs within predefined genomic regions. This facilitates efficient prioritization of samples for time-consuming or costly subsequent analyses such as Multiplex Ligation-dependent Probe Amplification (MLPA), short-read, and long-read whole genome sequencing. We incorporate four genes to establish our methods-Parkin (PRKN), Leucine Rich Repeat And Ig Domain Containing 2 (LINGO2), Microtubule Associated Protein Tau (MAPT), and alpha-Synuclein (SNCA)-which may be relevant to neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), or related disorders such as essential tremor (ET). By training our models on expert-annotated samples and validating them across diverse cohorts, including those from the Global Parkinson's Genetics Program (GP2) and additional dementia-specific databases, we demonstrate the efficacy of CNV-Finder in accurately detecting deletions and duplications. Our pipeline outputs app-compatible files for visualization within CNV-Finder's interactive web application. This interface enables researchers to review predictions and filter displayed samples by model prediction values, LRR range, and variant count in order to explore or confirm results. Our pipeline integrates this human feedback to enhance model performance and reduce false positive rates. Through a series of comprehensive analyses and validations using visual inspection, MLPA, short-read, and long-read sequencing data, we demonstrate the robustness and adaptability of CNV-Finder in identifying CNVs with regions of varied size, probe density, and noise. Our findings highlight the significance of contextual understanding and human expertise in enhancing the precision of CNV identification, particularly in complex genomic regions like 17q21.31. The CNV-Finder pipeline is a scalable, publicly available resource for the scientific community, available on GitHub (https://github.com/GP2code/CNV-Finder; DOI 10.5281/zenodo.14182563). CNV-Finder not only expedites accurate candidate identification but also significantly reduces the manual workload for researchers, enabling future targeted validation and downstream analyses in regions or phenotypes of interest.

Copy Number Variation (CNV)↗