Access and Integration: Perspectives of Disabled Students Living on Campus

Disabled students may face ableist challenges in the campus residential environment. Although campus housing plays a critical role in retention by promoting social integration, little is known about what promotes the engagement of disabled students in campus living environments because the literature about these students focuses on legal topics or accommodations. In this study, we wanted to understand how disabled students experienced living on campus and how the residential experience promoted social integration. We employed a critical constructivist case study approach, framing disability from a social justice perspective. Data for this study come from interviews with 24 students attending four highly residential liberal arts colleges. Students reported that the degree of accessibility, flexibility, use of accommodations, and staff disability awareness and responsiveness influenced their social integration and residential experience. Implications for practice include providing disability-specific staff training, tailoring accommodations to individual students, conceptualizing access broadly, using single rooms creatively, and viewing dining services as part of the housing experience even if the administrative locations are different

The regulatory genome constrains protein sequence evolution: implications for the search for disease-associated genes

The development of explanatory models of protein sequence evolution has broad implications for our understanding of cellular biology, population history, and disease etiology. Here we analyze the GTEx transcriptome resource to quantify the effect of the transcriptome on protein sequence evolution in a multi-tissue framework. We find substantial variation among the central nervous system tissues in the effect of expression variance on evolutionary rate, with highly variable genes in the cortex showing significantly greater purifying selection than highly variable genes in subcortical regions (Mann–Whitney U p = 1.4 × 10−4). The remaining tissues cluster in observed expression correlation with evolutionary rate, enabling evolutionary analysis of genes in diverse physiological systems, including digestive, reproductive, and immune systems. Importantly, the tissue in which a gene attains its maximum expression variance significantly varies (p = 5.55 × 10−284) with evolutionary rate, suggesting a tissue-anchored model of protein sequence evolution. Using a large-scale reference resource, we show that the tissue-anchored model provides a transcriptome-based approach to predicting the primary affected tissue of developmental disorders. Using gradient boosted regression trees to model evolutionary rate under a range of model parameters, selected features explain up to 62% of the variation in evolutionary rate and provide additional support for the tissue model. Finally, we investigate several methodological implications, including the importance of evolutionary-rate-aware gene expression imputation models using genetic data for improved search for disease-associated genes in transcriptome-wide association studies. Collectively, this study presents a comprehensive transcriptome-based analysis of a range of factors that may constrain molecular evolution and proposes a novel framework for the study of gene function and disease mechanism