Jason O Brant

Dr. Brant’s research focuses on the role of DNA methylation and chromatin structure in regulating gene expression, and on how perturbations of the epigenome contribute to the onset and progression of disease, particularly cancer and sepsis. He received his doctorate in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Florida under the mentorship of Dr. Thomas P. Yang, followed by postdoctoral training in epigenetics and in mammalian tissue regeneration and transcriptome assembly. Dr. Brant is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, where he leads the Bioinformatics Unit of the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Shared Resource at the UF Health Cancer Institute, an NCI-designated Cancer Center, and co-leads the Bioinformatics, Statistical, and Methodological Core of the Florida–California CaRE2 Health Center. In these roles he supports cancer center members and investigators across UF, FAMU, and USC. Rigor and reproducibility anchor his group’s approach, which combines community-vetted Nextflow/nf-core pipelines with custom downstream workflows delivered as version-controlled, interactive Quarto reports. His work spans DNA methylation (EM-seq, WGBS, RRBS), chromatin accessibility, histone modifications, and bulk and single-cell transcriptomics. He also develops open-source software for emerging epigenomic assays, including SMFnorm, an R package implementing a statistically robust normalization method for single-molecule footprinting data, and continues to develop new technologies for assaying chromatin structure.

Dr. Brant’s research investigates how the epigenome records and maintains a cellular memory of prior exposures, and how that memory becomes maladaptive in disease. A central premise of his work is that transient insults—a severe environmental stress, an acute infection, a developmental perturbation—can leave durable marks on DNA methylation and chromatin architecture that persist long after the initiating event, reshaping how cells respond to later stimuli. One line of this work examines the epigenetic consequences of acute physiological stress. Using a mouse model of exertional heat stroke, Dr. Brant and his collaborators showed that bone marrow–derived monocytes undergo DNA methylation deprogramming within days of exposure that persists for at least a month, accompanied by an immunosuppressive phenotype in whole blood and an altered heat shock response—evidence that a single severe exposure can durably reprogram immune cells. A second line extends this question to sepsis and critical illness. Working with colleagues across the UF Sepsis and Critical Illness Research Center, he has characterized chromatin remodeling in myeloid-derived suppressor cells and tissue-resident macrophages following sepsis and burn injury, including work identifying divergent chromatin remodeling trajectories in circulating CD66b+ MDSCs that distinguish patients who recover from those who progress to chronic critical illness. This work aims to determine whether the chromatin state of circulating immune cells can serve as an early indicator of long-term outcome. His earlier work in genomic imprinting established that deletion of the Prader-Willi syndrome imprinting center alters DNA methylation at loci genome-wide, outside the canonical AS/PWS imprinted domain, and that the Angelman syndrome imprinting center contains an oocyte-specific promoter responsible for establishing maternal methylation—findings that revealed previously unrecognized functions for these regulatory elements. Alongside these applications, Dr. Brant develops computational methods and software for emerging epigenomic assays. This includes normalization methods for single-molecule footprinting data generated with exogenous DNA methyltransferases (MAPit/NOMe-seq), released as the R package SMFnorm, as well as open-source tools for differential chromatin accessibility analysis. All methods are developed with reproducibility as a design constraint: analyses are built on community-vetted Nextflow/nf-core pipelines, version-controlled, containerized, and delivered as interactive reports that collaborators can independently rerun. Through the Bioinformatics Unit and the CaRE2 Bioinformatics, Statistical, and Methodological Core, this methodological work also supports investigators across UF, FAMU, and USC, spanning DNA methylation, chromatin accessibility, histone modification, and bulk and single-cell transcriptomic studies.