In this article we review a number of recent studies in which information derived from genomic alignments and data concerning composition, location and biochemical features of the nuclear DNA are used to investigate salient properties and determinants of change (mutations) in the human genome. The studies under review, all conducted by an interdisciplinary group of investigators at The Pennsylvania State University, required the use of a range of statistical techniques—from regression, to multivariate analysis, to the modeling of latent structures.