Skip to main content

Devi Swain Lenz

Assistant Research Professor in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology
Molecular Genetics and Microbiology

Selected Publications


Type I interferon signaling and peroxisomal dysfunction contribute to enhanced inflammatory cytokine production in IRGM1-deficient macrophages.

Journal Article J Biol Chem · November 2024 The human IRGM gene has been linked to inflammatory diseases including sepsis and Crohn's disease. Decreased expression of human IRGM, or the mouse orthologues Irgm1 and Irgm2, leads to increased production of a number of inflammatory chemokines and cytoki ... Full text Link to item Cite

Genetic changes from type I interferons and JAK inhibitors: clues to drivers of juvenile dermatomyositis.

Journal Article Rheumatology (Oxford) · September 1, 2024 OBJECTIVE: To better understand the pathogenesis of juvenile dermatomyositis (JDM), we examined the effect of the cytokines type I interferons (IFN I) and JAK inhibitor drugs (JAKi) on gene expression in bioengineered pediatric skeletal muscle. METHODS: My ... Full text Link to item Cite

Evaluating Chromatin Accessibility Differences Across Multiple Primate Species Using a Joint Modeling Approach.

Journal Article Genome biology and evolution · October 2019 Changes in transcriptional regulation are thought to be a major contributor to the evolution of phenotypic traits, but the contribution of changes in chromatin accessibility to the evolution of gene expression remains almost entirely unknown. To address th ... Full text Cite

Comparative Analyses of Chromatin Landscape in White Adipose Tissue Suggest Humans May Have Less Beigeing Potential than Other Primates.

Journal Article Genome Biol Evol · July 1, 2019 Humans carry a much larger percentage of body fat than other primates. Despite the central role of adipose tissue in metabolism, little is known about the evolution of white adipose tissue in primates. Phenotypic divergence is often caused by genetic diver ... Full text Link to item Cite

Comparative analyses of chromatin landscape in white adipose tissue suggest humans may have less beigeing potential than other primates

Journal Article · 2019 Humans carry a much larger percentage of body fat than other primates. Despite the central role of adipose tissue in metabolism, little is known about the evolution of white adipose tissue in primates. Phenotypic divergence is often caused by genetic diver ... Full text Cite

A High-Throughput Mutational Scan of an Intrinsically Disordered Acidic Transcriptional Activation Domain.

Journal Article Cell Syst · April 25, 2018 Transcriptional activation domains are essential for gene regulation, but their intrinsic disorder and low primary sequence conservation have made it difficult to identify the amino acid composition features that underlie their activity. Here, we describe ... Full text Link to item Cite

Causal Genetic Variation Underlying Metabolome Differences.

Journal Article Genetics · August 2017 An ongoing challenge in biology is to predict the phenotypes of individuals from their genotypes. Genetic variants that cause disease often change an individual's total metabolite profile, or metabolome. In light of our extensive knowledge of metabolic pat ... Full text Link to item Cite

Evaluation to Improve a High School Summer Science Outreach Program

Journal Article Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education · May 2016 The goal of the Young Scientist Program (YSP) at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (WUSM) is to broaden science literacy and recruit talent for the scientific future. In particular, YSP seeks to expose underrepresented minority ... Full text Cite

From DNA to a human: What the ENCODE and Roadmap Epigenome Projects can teach us about how we are who we are

Journal Article Biochemist · January 1, 2015 The assembly of the human genome sequence revealed that there are 3.2 billion bases in our genome, but what was less clear at the time was how this vast amount of information was organised and expressed to ensure that a single-celled zygote was able to dev ... Full text Cite

Heterochronic meiotic misexpression in an interspecific yeast hybrid.

Journal Article Mol Biol Evol · June 2014 Regulatory changes rapidly accumulate between species, and interspecific hybrids often misexpress genes. Hybrid misexpression, expression levels outside the range of both parental species, can result from cis- and trans-acting regulatory changes that inter ... Full text Link to item Cite

A catalog of neutral and deleterious polymorphism in yeast.

Journal Article PLoS Genet · August 29, 2008 The abundance and identity of functional variation segregating in natural populations is paramount to dissecting the molecular basis of quantitative traits as well as human genetic diseases. Genome sequencing of multiple organisms of the same species provi ... Full text Link to item Cite