Boris Vandemoortele
Doctoral student – Lab for Computational Biology, Integromics and Gene Regulation (CBIGR) - Department of Biomedical Molecular Biology, Faculty of Sciences & Department of Biomolecular Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, UGent
Principal investigator: prof. Vanessa Vermeirssen (PhD)
Research focus
Recent studies have highlighted dysregulation of the intricate interplay between chromatin organization, transcriptional regulation, protein expression and cellular metabolism in complex diseases such as cancer and neuro-inflammatory disorders. Technological advancements have led to an explosion in the amount of available omics data, both at bulk and single cell level, as well as across multiple regulatory layers in the cell. The integration of these multi-omics data provides a novel and exciting approach to study such complex diseases. However, multi-omics data integration is challenging, and diverse methodologies are available. Integrated regulatory networks, which map multi-omics molecular interactions across molecular modalities, are a means to study gene regulation mechanistically at a system level and allow to generate biological hypotheses and to identify biomarkers and novel drug targets.
In my PhD, I aim to build data analysis strategies for multi-omics integration, specifically focusing on, but not limited to, the inclusion of metabolomics in integrated gene regulatory networks. This allows to identify novel regulatory metabolite-gene interactions that contribute regulatory network rewiring during inflammation. In addition, I apply genome-scale metabolic modeling to study tissue- or cell type- specific metabolism, thus overcoming hurdles inherent to bulk metabolomics datasets. In the end, we aim to generate interpretable hypotheses from multi-omics data, resulting in novel drug targets of biomarkers.
Biography
I graduated as a master of biochemistry and biotechnology at Ghent University in 2021, with a major in bioinformatics and systems biology and a minor in biomedical biotechnology. During my thesis, I studied the function of the glucocorticoid receptor during hypoxia and sepsis by applying genome wide transcription and DNA binding analysis.
As of October 2021, I started my PhD in the lab of Computational Biology, Integromics and Gene Regulation where I have been working on multi-omics data integration in neuroinflammatory disorders and glioblastoma.