Ms. Ayushi Dwivedi, Ph.D. research scholar at the Dept. of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad, presented a paper titled “Integrative systems biology approach to identify gender-specific key genes and their regulatory networks in lung cancer progression” at a conference titled “ISMB/ECCB 2023 (31st Conference on Intelligent Systems For Molecular Biology and 22nd Annual European Conference on Computational Biology), held at Centre de Congrès Lyon, France from 23-07-2023 to 27-07-2023.
ISMB/ECCB is the largest and most high-profile annual meeting of scientists working in computational biology and provides an intense multidisciplinary forum for disseminating the latest developments in computational tools for data-driven biological research. Ayushi’s paper discusses the role of lncRNAs as a central molecule in gene regulation at the transcriptional level by working as competing endogenous RNA molecules in lung cancer development and progression. By using an integrative network biology approach, she identified novel lncRNA and target gene interactions that were specific to gender in LUSC and LUAD, major types of lung cancer. These key genes can be used for developing novel therapeutic strategies. This paper is a part of her doctoral research project that explores network biology approaches to identify critical genes that have a role in the development and progression of lung cancer.
The keynote speakers for the conference were Janet Kelso (MPI Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany), Dana Pe’er (Howard Hughes Medical Institute, US), Jingyi Jessica Li (UCLA, US), Hanah Margalit (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) and Mark Gerstein (Yale University US) along with Network Biology track chaired by Martina Summer-Kutmon, Anais Baudot and Natasa Przulj with over 2089 in-person participants from across Europe, the US, the UK, Japan, Singapore, Australia, and India. Also, Ms. Ayushi, got potential contacts for future collaborations such as University of Colorado School of Medicine, USA and Technology Innovation Institute, UAE.
Ayushi is immensely thankful to the Institute of Eminence (IoE) at the University of Hyderabad for providing a travel grant to attend the conference. She also thanks ICMR, Govt. of India for funding the Laboratory of Computational Functional Genomics at the Department of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics. She also expressed her heartfelt appreciation to her PhD Supervisor Dr. Vaibhav Vindal, for being so supportive, for his valuable guidance and supervision throughout her research.