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arXiv · 2611.03667

A signal-processing cascade linking satellite heat exposure, genomic variation, and mortality risk

Abstract

Heat-related mortality varies among individuals under similar environmental conditions, yet environmental exposure and genetic susceptibility are typically modelled separately. We propose a signal-processing cascade linking satellite-derived land-surface temperature to sequence-dependent heat-shock response and mortality risk. The framework combines distributed-lag filtering of thermal exposure, nonlinear HSF1 activation, cross-correlation with an HSF1 position-weight-matrix kernel, and Hill-model mapping of sequence-dependent binding changes to regulatory response. Applied to 52 heat-response genes and 157 naturally occurring variants, the framework identifies 21 heat-shock-element arrays across 17 genes. Variants in canonical arrays are significantly enriched for predicted binding disruption ($p=3\times10^{-4}$). Propagating these effects through the cascade yields a peak predicted mortality-risk multiplier of $1.68\times$ at $40$--$42\,^{\circ}\mathrm{C}$. The framework demonstrates how environmental and genomic signals can be integrated to model inter-individual variation in heat-related risk.

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Usman Nazir, Sara Khalid. 2026-09-28. A signal-processing cascade linking satellite heat exposure, genomic variation, and mortality risk. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03667

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