Program > Browse abstracts by speaker > Lossie Amy

The Somatic Mosaicism across Human Tissues Network (SMaHT) is a new NIH Common Fund Program focused on discovering the patterns of somatic variation across the human body, with an emphasis on somatic SNVs, indels, structural variation, and mobile DNA. The NIH Common Fund spurs biomedical advances by seeding new areas of research that require a multi-disciplinary approach and are poised to catalyze future research. The SMaHT network will assess somatic variation in ~15 post-mortem tissues from a cohort of 150 healthy donors from diverse backgrounds. The goals of SMaHT are to understand how somatic variation affects human biology through: 1. Building a variant catalog of somatic variation in these tissues; 2. Developing innovative tools, technologies, and data pipelines to increase our ability to analyze all types of somatic variation in bulk tissues, as well as single cells and small cellular pools; and 3. Integrating these diverse variant discoveries into a user-friendly SMaHT Data Workbench that can be easily accessed by the broader biomedical research community; and 4. Creating a foundation that future genomic and genetic studies can build on to discover how somatic variation contributes to biological processes in health, disease, and across the lifespan. SMaHT consists of 21 research groups including: 1. A Tissue Procurement Center, which will curate the tissue repository; 2. Five Genome Characterization Centers, which will conduct three core assays (short- and long-read DNA sequencing and RNA sequencing) on all tissues; 3. 14 Technology Development Projects that will improve the ability to accurately detect somatic variation; 4. A Data Analysis Center that will be responsible for ingesting, curating, and analyzing all data from the SMaHT Network; and 5. An Organizational Center that will coordinate SMaHT Network activities and create outreach and engagement strategies for the research community to use these resources. Learn about SMaHT here: https://smaht.org/.