Dr. Nicholette Allred is a molecular geneticist with an interest in understanding the genetic architecture of complex diseases and underlying risk factors in minority populations. My research focuses broadly on metabolic disease, with ongoing studies in the areas of diabetes, obesity, liver disease, nephropathy, cognition and cardiovascular disease.
We routinely use next-generation sequencing, gene expression analysis, and mass spectrometry to profile cells and tissues from human patients and animal models to identify early molecular changes that happen in target tissues and organs during the initial development of diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular diseases, or dyslipidemias and fatty liver disease.
Our group has been developing novel methodologies to functionally study human genome variation, and to help understand how mutations and sequence variants that have been identified in large-scale genetic studies (e.g. genome-wide association studies) actually affect the normal function of cells.
Work in our lab ranges from basic molecular biology to tissue culture, high-end sequencing and mass spectrometry, and computational data analysis.