Lab activities

There is an urgent need to understand the interplay of pollutants with adverse effects in the brain, in order to steer political decision making for efficient reduction of air pollutants. This could, in the long run, reduce the economic burden caused by diseases associated with them. To address this unmet need, the TUBE-project unites interdisciplinary expertise to study these adverse effects of extremely fine particles (UFP’s) in the human lung and brain. Leaning on this interdisciplinary approach and state of the art research methodologies, TUBE will aim to discover the harmful components of air pollution and identify biomarkers for early detection of brain disease related to air pollution. This could improve brain health, reduce the prevalence of brain diseases, provide significant economical savings, and provide data that will be used to support planning future traffic policy across the EU. Read more.

ADAIR applies a precision medicine approach to stratify individuals to subgroups for risk estimation and future AD prevention, ultimately aiming to target air pollution induced effects in those individualsthat can most benefit from them. The project investigates the novel, ambitious hypothesis that the pollutant exposure environment of an individual alters cellular mechanisms and functions, resulting in the expression of measurable biomarkers. By identifying biomarkers, the individuals with increased AD risk can be stratified prior to the disease onset and preventive measures can be targeted to the specific at-risk populations in order to be most effective.
The main objectives are to:

• Discover biomarkers of air pollutant effects.
• Correlate biomarkers to AD risk to identify sub-groups of individuals with an increased susceptibility for air pollutant effects.
• Better understand how the exposure environment is linked with complex disease mechanisms underlying AD, thus paving the way for future therapeutic approaches.

Read more.

The University of Eastern Finland has received EU funding to recruit 14 doctoral students into a four-year multidisciplinary Neuro-Innovation PhD programme, which will be implemented on the Kuopio campus. The University of Verona and Infomics research group are partners of the neuro-innovation PhD programme. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Cofund grant of 1,5 million euros will increase the scope and quality of multidisciplinary research in the UEF Neuroscience Research Community (NEURO). Thereby, it will also generate a strong positive impact on health innovation in Finland and beyond. The recruitment of the international PhD students will start in June 2021. Read more.

We are organizing AIRDEGEN 2021 Workshop:

Despite decades of neurodegenerative disease (ND) research, the real molecular pathophysiology of the disease is still poorly understood, and treatments remain inadequate. Remarkably little attention is paid to the involvement of environmental factors, which are known from epidemiological studies to strongly impact ND development. Air pollution, a massive public health issue known to pose a major threat to human health, is an important, ever-increasing global concern. A growing body of evidence from epidemiological and controlled animal studies shows that exposure to air pollutants also impairs the brain. Furthermore, living in highly polluted areas is associated with exacerbated cognitive dysfunction and ND. Many questions remain unanswered as mechanistic information on air pollutant effects on the brain is scarce. Importantly, biomarkers for air pollution and ND risk prediction do not currently exist, thus hindering the identification and stratification of individuals at risk for harmful air pollution effects.
This workshop aims to investigate the novel, ambitious hypothesis that the pollutant exposure environment of an individual alters cellular mechanisms and functions, resulting in the expression of measurable biomarkers. By identifying biomarkers, the individuals with increased ND risk can be stratified prior to the disease onset and preventive measures can be targeted to the specific at-risk populations in order to be most effective. Read more.

We are organizing MODIMO 2021 Workshop:

Multi-omics analysis aims at extracting previously uncovered biological knowledge by integrating information across multiple single-omic sources. Past approaches have focused on the simultaneous analysis of a small number of omic data sets. Current challenges face the problem of integrating multiple omic sources into a unified complex model, or of combining already available tools for two-by-two omics analyses and merging their outcomes. By doing so and leveraging integrated system-level knowledge, multi-omic approaches ought to enable the development of better qualitative and quantitative models for descriptive and predictive analyses. To move this area forward, new statistical and algorithmic frameworks are needed, for example for generalizing classical graph theory results to heterogeneous networks, and applying them to diverse problems such as drug repurposing or understanding the immune response to infections. Thus, in short, this workshop aims at investigating novel methodologies for providing crucial insights into multi-omics data management, integration, and analysis in order to enable biological discoveries. Read more.

We are presenting one poster "Variant and haplotype aware motif scanning on genome variation graphs" at RECOMB 2021:

RECOMB 2021 is the 25th edition of a series of algorithmic computational biology conferences bridging the areas of computational, mathematical, statistical and biological sciences. The conference features keynote talks by preeminent scientists in life sciences, presentations of ground breaking research in computational biology, selected over the course of a highly-rigorous peer-review process, and poster sessions on the latest research progress. Read more.

Join the virtual conference to talk with Manuel about his work! In a hurry? Check out the short video presention below!

We are presenting a tutorial on Imaging Genetics at ICHI 2021 Conference:

Imaging genetics is an emerging longitudinal research field bridging genetic insights to complex neurological diseases, exploiting quantitative brain imaging phenotypes. Imaging genetics primarly focus on identifying and characterizing how genic expression and genomic variation affect neuroanatomical and neurophysiological traits, by exploiting brain images information. Until now, have been proposed several imaging genetics methods to investigate and improve our knowledge on different complex diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, but only few works focused on Parkinson's Disease (PD). Using PD as study case, our lab members Guglielmo Cerri, Rosalba Giugno and Manuel Tognon will showcase a tutorial on imaging genetics during ICHI 2021, guiding the attendents through the different steps of the analysis. Moreover, they will also present an innovative multi-view imaging genetics workflow, which exploits the advantages of existing methods to analyze heterogenous data, such as genotyping, transcriptomic, and neuromorphological and functional brain images. During the tuorial will be presented the main aspects of imaging genetics analyses, moving from classical quality control to more techinical steps of the proposed method, such as GWAS, differential expression analysis and functional annotation. The talk will take place on August 11th 2021 during ICHI 2021 (held online). Read more.

We are presenting three abstracts at BITS 2021 Conference:

BITS conference highlights keynote talks by excellent scientists in bioinformatics and its applications, presentations of state-of-the-art research in computational biology, and poster sessions on the latest research progress. Join the virtual conference to listen to 3 oral presentations by Manuel, Vincenzo, and Giovanni & Eva. Read more.

Rosalba Giugno is editor for the Research Topic "Computational Approaches for Biomarker Detection and Precision Therapeutics in Cancers" of Frontiers. Research Topic aims to explore recent advances in computational techniques used to harness large-scale cancer genomic and clinical data for biomarker detection or precision therapeutic strategies. At the same time, our goal is keeping the focus on clinical relevance and attempting to bridge the gap between computational and clinical research. Computational approaches used for biomarker detection, therapeutic response prediction, drug repurposing, and identifying effective drug combination therapies will be discussed within this topic. Particularly, detection of cancer patients with aggressive vs non-aggressive phenotypes, or patients who may benefit from certain targeted therapies or immunotherapies, using molecular markers will be of interest. Read more.

Rosalba Giugno is editor in Frontiers in Genetics and she has received the Frontiers in Genetics 2021 Outstanding Associate Editor Award–Specialty Section Computational Genomics. Frontiers in Genetics publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research on genes and genomes relating to all the domains of life, from humans to plants to livestock and other model organisms. Led by an outstanding Editorial Board of the world’s leading experts, this multidisciplinary, open-access journal is at the forefront of communicating cutting-edge research to researchers, academics, clinicians, policy makers and the public. The study of inheritance and the impact of the genome on various biological processes is well documented. However, the majority of discoveries are still to come. A new era is seeing major developments in the function and variability of the genome, the use of genetic and genomic tools and the analysis of the genetic basis of various biological phenomena. Read more.

Rosalba Giugno is associate editor in Frontiers in Bioinformatics | Network in Bioinformatics. Modern molecular and cell biology no longer focus on single macromolecules but now look into complexes, pathways or even entire organism interactomes. The emerging field of network biology is now mainly centred on unravelling these relationships and developing novel methodologies to extract the information that they contain. A deeper knowledge of the global topology of interactome networks, and how they change in response to insults (i.e. disease states) will have important bearings in many scientific areas, from evolutionary biology to biomedical research. Read more.

Rosalba Giugno is Bioinformatics editor in Elsevier Information Systems Journal. Information systems are the software and hardware systems that support data-intensive applications. The journal Information Systems publishes articles concerning the design and implementation of languages, data models, process models, algorithms, software and hardware for information systems. Subject areas include data management issues as presented in the principal international database conferences (e.g., ACM SIGMOD/PODS, VLDB, ICDE and ICDT/EDBT) as well as data-related issues from the fields of data mining/machine learning, information retrieval coordinated with structured data, internet and cloud data management, business process management, web semantics, visual and audio information systems, scientific computing, and data science. Read more.

Vincenzo Bonnici is editor for the Special Issue "Information-Theoretical Methods in Biological Systems". If life developed when biopolymers emerged to efficiently represent, elaborate upon, and transmit information, we cannot have a deep understanding of life without an application of information theory. Investigations from this perspective, in the general setting of the functional and evolutionary nature of living systems, are welcome in this Special Issue on Information-Theoretical Methods in Biological Systems. Read more.

Vincenzo Bonnici is editor for the Special Issue "Energy-Aware Smart Systems in Healthcare". Energy-aware systems in health automation are emerging as a new and inter-disciplinary research field. We are witnessing a rapid development of advanced application (by using information, communications, automation, and networking technologies) to realize smart control systems in several smart systems regarding healthcare. Smart systems are critical in driving innovations in the field of medical technology, as they provide the basis for information-based health maintenance, and for guaranteeing an efficient management of medical data and information processes (i.e., big data management in smart systems and smart networks). Moreover, the integration of low-power micro-sensors and micro-actuators will provide a technological healthcare for better treatment and caretaking of patients in the hospital and at home Read more.

Vincenzo Bonnici is editor for the Special Issue "Smart Systems for Healthcare". Health automation systems are emerging as a new and interdisciplinary research field, in two different ways: medical smart assistance and the use of biomedical and/or bioinformatics approaches. We are witnessing a rapid development of advanced applications (by using information, communications, automation, and networking technologies) to realize smart and autonomous control systems in several systems regarding healthcare. Smart systems are critical in driving innovations in the field of medical technology, as they provide the basis for information-based health maintenance, and guarantee an efficient management of medical data and information processes (i.e., big data management in smart systems and smart networks). Read more.

HTLab (Healthcare Technology Lab) is an innovative startup founded on November 6, 2019, owned by vEyes (virtual Eyes) - ONLUS. Despite his young age, thanks to the skills, the laboratories, the infrastructures and the network with the clinical and technological realities that revolve around vEyes, HTLab has already been among the winners of the third open call launched by the FLAME project (H2020, grant agreement no. 731677). Read more.