The Human Brain: Leveraging omic data to discover the genetics of matching energy supply and demand in health and disease

The energy demands of the brain are high and evolutionary studies indicate that emergence of higher cognitive function in humans is associated with shifting energy metabolism. Despite a key role for tightly co-regulated mitochondrial and nuclear processes to satisfy high-energy demands, the genetics and functional mechanisms linking the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes remain understudied in brain. This project aims to uncover how genetic variation modulates the mitochondrial transcriptome in different brain regions, to understand the evolutionary trajectory of identified genetic variation associated with the development of the human brain, and the importance of these processes in human ageing and disease.