Mots-Clés

Bioinformatics, omics, data analysis, computational biology, RNAseq

Description

Title: RNA-seq analysis of pollutants on HepaRG cells, a human hepatic cell line and creation of web interface.

Project Summary:

The proposed project will aim to analyze RNA seq data generated from HepaRG cells exposed to single or a mixture of pollutants to understand their effects on metabolic disorders such as obesity and diabetes. The results will be discussed with experimentalists in the laboratory for validation, and will be display via a web interface to be designed.

Description :

Exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals including persistent organic pollutants (POPs) represents one of the most critical public health threats nowadays. In addition to the human health hazard, the associated ecosystem toxicity and significant economic burden relied to disorders such as metabolic diseases constitute additional incentives for the development of innovative approaches (including computational models) to decipher putative linkages between health outcomes and environmental chemicals.

The project will take place in the SysTox group under the MetaTox team (Inserm Unit 1124), that is located on the Campus Saint Germain at the Université Paris Cité. The group works in bioinformatics, and is specialized in the development of innovative and new methods and models in order to better understand the impact of the chemical exposure on human health.

The project intends to identify the cellular targets of diabetogenic pollutants to decipher the complex modes of action (MoA) of these pollutants. The candidate will be involved in the analysis of the data, from normalization to identification of biological pathways with bioinformatics technics (advanced statistical & bioinformatics tools via dedicated software e.g. Bioconductor in R). As a next step, biological network representation and analysis (for ex. clustering) of the results will be done using the Cytoscape tool, and other data types will be integrated (disease annotations) in order to fully interpret the results. The candidate will use a technical pipeline already established in the group and will participate in the creation of web interface to present the workflow of analysis and the obtained results. The web interface will be only for internal use (within the Inserm unit).

A close collaboration with the other members of the SysTox group (engineer, PhD, postdoc) and the experimentalists is expected.

A documentation of the bioinformatics analysis (scripts and results) will be provided by the end of internship.