Texas Biomed Staff

Marcio Almeida

Post-doctoral Scientist | Genetics
Phone: 210-258-9662
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Summary

Dr. Almeida came to Texas Biomed from Brazil in August 2011, bringing a specialized background in bioinformatics. This field applies advanced computer science and information technology to the analysis of biological information. He is applying those skills to the ongoing family studies at Texas Biomed, which are analyzing extended family pedigrees to find genetic factors that underlie complex traits and diseases. He is working with John Blangero, Ph.D., and others to discover genes and gene pathways that play a role in phenotypes like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, basic brain biology and mental illnesses. 

Education

Doctoral Degree: Ph.D. Bioinformatics (2010)

University of Sao Paulo Sao Paulo , Brazil

Bachelor's Degree Bachelor's Biology (2004)

Pontificia Universidade de Católica de Campinas PUC Campinas , Brazil

Research Focus

I am a bioinformatician with expertise in the use of deep sequencing platforms to undertake global gene expression analysis.  My main goal is to try to bring some biological knowledge to the use of these platforms and combine the results with genome-wide association studies to search for associated markers in phenotypes of interest. My doctoral thesis focused on the determination of regulatory players acting in a target gene of interest. This was accomplished by a combination of multi-species sequence comparison and statistical models. 

Publications

An empirical evaluation of imputation accuracy for association statistics reveals increased type-I error rates in genome-wide associations.

Almeida MAA, Oliveira PSL, Pereira TV, Krieger JE, Pereira AC
BMC Genet 12 (Jan 20): 10, 2011
PubMed ID: 21251252

Insights into the organization of dorsal spinal cord pathways from an evolutionarily conserved raldh2 intronic enhancer.

Castillo HA, Cravo RM, Azambuja AP, Simões-Costa MS, Sura-Trueba S, Gonzalez J, Slonimsky E, Almeida K, Abreu JG, de Almeida MA, Sobreira TP, de Oliveira SH, de Oliveira PS, Signore IA, Colombo A, Concha ML, Spengler TS, Bronner-Fraser M, Nobrega M, Rosenthal N, Xavier-Neto J
Development 137 (3): 507-18, 2010
PubMed ID: 20081195