I am a computational biologist and population geneticist, working to turn observations of genetic variation within populations into insights about evolutionary and demographic history. From July 2016 to April 2019 I was a postdoc with Rasmus Nielsen in the Departments of Integrative Biology and Statistics at UC Berkeley. Before that, I was a PhD student studying theoretical population genetics with John Wakeley at Harvard University. During Summer 2019, I hiked 1750 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, and I am currently looking to transition into a role in biotech.
You can reach me at peterrwilton@gmail.com.
As a postdoc, I worked on multiple projects in applied population genetics, statistical genetics, and bioinformatics.
My primary project involved designing population-genetic inference methodology for understanding mitochondrial genetic variation within the body and between mother and offspring (i.e., mitochondrial heteroplasmy). The mitochondria transmitted between mother and offspring—and those within an individual—can be thought of as a network of mitochondrial populations related by an ontogenetic phylogeny. Each branch of this phylogeny represents a different stage of life, during which the relative frequencies of different mitochondrial genotypes can change. Adapting approaches used in population phylogenetics, I have developed a method that uses heteroplasmy frequencies in different tissues to generate insight into the ontogenetic dynamics of mitochondrial inheritance and proliferation. This project is a collaboration with Kateryna Makova at Penn State University, whose lab has generated a large dataset of heteroplasmy frequencies in multi-generation human pedigrees.
Another project involves investigating signals of diminishing-returns or synergistic epistatsis in the UK Biobank data, adding non-linearity terms to standard additive polygenic score models. This work is ongoing.
One current limitation of current sequencing technologies is that they struggle to identify low-frequency variants in somatic DNA libraries. In collaboration with my postdoctoral advisor Rasmus Nielsen, I have designed and implemented a novel empirical Bayesian approach to distinguishing sequencing error from true low-frequency variants. See the project's GitHub page for details.
Previously, as a graduate student with John Wakeley at Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, I studied various topics in theoretical population genetics, mostly related to the coalescent process. These topics included
Zaidi, A.*, Wilton, P.R.*, Su, M.S.*, Paul, I.M., Anthony, K., Nekrutenko, A., Nielsen, R., and Makova, K. (2019). The germline bottleneck, mother’s age, and selection modulate the transmission dynamics of mtDNA heteroplasmies in human pedigrees. PNAS, accepted.
Barrett, A.*, Arbeithuber, B.*, Zaidi, A., Wilton, P.R., Paul, I., Nielsen, R., Makova, K. Pronounced somatic bottleneck in mitochondrial DNA of human hair (2019) Philosophical Transactions B, accepted.
Stern, A., Wilton, P.R., Nielsen, R. (2019) An approximate full-likelihood method for inferring selection and allele frequency trajectories from DNA sequence data. PLOS Genetics 15: e1008384. (bioRxiv)
Garg, K.M., Chattopadhyay, B., Wilton, P.R., Malia Prawiradilaga, D., and Rheindt, F.E. (2018). Pleistocene land bridges act as semipermeable agents of avian gene flow in Wallacea. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 2018.
Wilton, P., Zaidi, A., Makova, K., and Nielsen, R. A population phylogenetic view of mitochondrial heteroplasmy. Genetics, 2018. (bioRxiv)
Ng, N.S.R., Wilton, P.R., Prawiradilaga, D.M., Tay, Y.C., Indrawan, M., Garg, K.M., and Rheindt, F.E. The effects of Pleistocene climate change on biotic differentiation in a montane songbird clade from Wallacea. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 2017.
Wilton, P.R., Baduel, P., Landon, M.M., and Wakeley, J. Population structure and coalescence in pedigrees: comparisons to the structured coalescent and a framework for inference. Theoretical Population Biology, 2017. (bioRxiv)
Wakeley J., Wilton P.R. Coalescent and models of identity by descent. In: Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Biology. Vol 1. Academic Press, Oxford, 2016: pp. 287-292. (pdf)
Wakeley, J., King, L., and Wilton, P.R. Effects of the population pedigree on genetic signatures of historical demographic events. PNAS, 2016.
Palamara, P.F., Francioli, L., Wilton, P.R., Genovese, G., Gusev, A., Finucane, H., Sankararaman, S., Sunyaev, S., Debakker, P., Wakeley, J., Pe'er, I., Price, A.L. Leveraging distant relatedness to quantify human mutation and gene conversion rates. American Journal of Human Genetics 2015. (bioRxiv)
Wilton, P.R., Carmi, S., and Hobolth, A. The SMC’ is a highly accurate approximation to the ancestral recombination graph. Genetics 2015. (arXiv)
Rheindt, F.E., Prawiradilaga, D.M., Suparno, S., Ashari, H., and Wilton, P.R. New and significant island records, range extensions and elevational extensions of birds in eastern Sulawesi, its nearby satellites, and Ternate. Treubia 2014.
Carmi, S., Wilton, P.R., Wakeley, J., and Pe’er, I. A renewal theory approach to IBD sharing. Theoretical Population Biology 2014. (arXiv)
Rheindt, F.E., Fujita, M.K., Wilton, P.R., Edwards, S.V., 2014. Introgression and phenotypic assimilation in Zimmerius flycatchers (Tyrannidae): Population genetic and phylogenetic inferences from genome-wide SNPs. Systematic Biology 2014.
Wilton, P.R., Sloan, D.B., Logsdon Jr, J.M., Doddapaneni, H., and Neiman, M. Characterization of transcriptomes from sexual and asexual lineages of a New Zealand snail (Potamopyrgus antipodarum). Molecular Ecology Resources 2013.
Neiman, M., Larkin, K., Thompson, A.R., and Wilton, P. Male offspring production by asexual Potamopyrgus antipodarum, a New Zealand snail. Heredity 2012.
Willacker, J.J., von Hippel, F.A., Wilton, P.R., and Walton, K.M. Classification of threespine stickleback along the benthic–limnetic axis. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 2010.
See also my Google Scholar profile and my PhD dissertation.
Available here.
Last updated Nov 2019