Project description:This project analyzes peripheral blood profiles of melanoma cancer patients. Since miRNAs are known to be valuable diagnostic markers we asked whether respective patterns of melanoma patients can be detected in peripheral blood samples rather than in biopsies. The project aimed at an improved understanding of complex profiles rather than single markers. Thus, a high-throughput technique was necessary, profiling all known miRNAs integratively. Top markers have been validated by using qPCR.
Project description:The inference of Gene Regulatory Networks (GRN) enables in silico generation of biological models, which are capable of integrat- ing large amounts of diverse biological information. These often base on gene expression data. In this project, several GRNs were reconstructed out of RPE-1 cells RNAseq data in order to identify cellular processes affected by antitumoral drug merbarone. Merbarone catalytically inhib- its the enzyme Topoisomerase II. Additionally, it is intended to provide an overview and a general pipeline for GRN inference and reconstruc- tion, from transcription data preprocessing to network validation and analysis.