Network-based approaches to study human context-specific cell signalling

23 November 2023, 1.00 PM - 23 November 2023, 2.00 PM

Evangelia Petsalaki (The European Bioinformatics Institute, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Genome Campus)

online

Hosted by Cardiff University's School of Medicine

It is well established that signalling responses happen through complex networks. However, most signalling research still uses linear pathways as the ground truth. Moreover, signalling responses are highly dependent on context, such as tissue type, genetic background etc and therefore these static pathways are not always suitable. There is also a high bias in the literature towards kinases and pathways for which reagents and prior knowledge is readily available. This leaves a huge dark space in our understanding of cell signalling and significantly hinders studies of its general principles.

In the first part of this talk I will present various network-based methods and approaches that we have developed in the group to extract active network signatures from omics datasets and to study condition-specific signalling networks and their relation to phenotype.

For the second part I will first briefly present Context-specific Essentiality Network-tools (CEN-tools), an integrative webserver and python package, that allows users to navigate the contexts of different gene essentialities. I will then describe an extension of this project whereby we have developed a linear model to deconvolute the effect of different tissue types and driver cancer mutations on context specific essentiality.

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Bio: Evangelia Petsalaki is a group leader at the The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) family, located on the Wellcome Genome Campus near Cambridge. She aims to understand and describe the organisation principles of cell signalling that allow the diverse and context-specific cell responses and phenotypes. The Petsalaki group uses interdisciplinary approaches, including data-driven network inference, modelling of cell processes and data integration, to understand how different environmental or genetic conditions affect cell signalling responses leading to diverse cell phenotypes. Evangelia has a PhD in structural bioinformatics from EMBL and the University of Heidelberg (2009) and did her post doctoral work at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, Canada (2010-2016).

Contact information

Enquires to Barbara Szomolay

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