Group of Clinical Genomic Networks

Department of Molecular Systems Biology -CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology

ZHU lisha

PH.D student of picb

Research object: Rheumatoid arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, systemic inflammatory disorder that may affect many tissues and organs, but principally attacks synovial joints. It is causing recruitment and activation of inflammatory cells, synovial hyperplasia, and destruction of cartilage and bone. It is a complex disease and presently there is no known cure for this disease, so systemic perspective on the biological functions activated and the molecular pathways involved in this disease is of crucial importance.

Research method: Bioinformatics

First we constructed a molecular interaction map with all the biological molecules and signal pathways related to RA and did topological analysis of this global map, from the topological analysis results, we got 12 modules and several hubs of both global map and sub-maps, most of the hubs we identified are already drug target and found out one potential drug target (CRKL) for RA.

Then we will collect multi-omic data (mRNA expression data, miRNA expression data and protein data) from patients with RA (the clinical experiments are undergoing) , and use Factor analysis, one kind of multivariate analysis method, to analysis the integrated multi-omic data to maximally the information we can get. Nowadays, since the development of high-throughput technologies, it is possible to get the data of different layers simultaneously, but the multi-omic data integration and analysis seem to be a challenge for bioinformatics, we will work on this problem and develop appropriate methodologies for multi-omic data analysis.