Cardiogenetics of the Future: Sequencing Helps Treat Heart Disease
The International Bioinformatics Laboratory of the HSE Faculty of Computer Science held a summer school titled "Cardiogenetics: From Sequencing to Cardiopanel Development." Eighteen participants, including physicians, biologists, and IT professionals, participated.
Future cardiologists, geneticists, and IT specialists met at HSE to learn how to "read" DNA for cardiovascular disease diagnostics. They explored modern sequencing methods and the intricacies of working with digital twins of cardiac patients.
Junior Research Fellow Galina Okhrimenko of the International Bioinformatics Laboratory explained in her introductory lecture that sequencing, a method for determining the nucleotide sequence of DNA and RNA, can be used in a variety of situations. Genetic testing results facilitate the identification of disease risks based on family histories, help select treatments for neonatal screening and pregnancy monitoring, and ultimately, diagnose existing diseases, including hereditary ones.
Herman Ashniyev, a visiting lecturer at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science's Department of Big Data and Information Retrieval, spoke to the audience about the specifics of using the Linux operating system and its Ubuntu distribution in bioinformatics. These are open-source operating systems, and new packages have been added to them for use in bioinformatics. He explained that working in Ubuntu is different from the familiar Windows experience, but it still allows you to write commands, view their history and process execution, and access files via links within the system.
Summarizing the school's results, Maria Poptsova, Head of the International Bioinformatics Laboratory at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Higher School of Economics, noted that the participants gained new useful knowledge, successfully mastered the program, and defended projects on the application of modern methods of genetic information analysis in the diagnosis and treatment of patients. She also noted the interdisciplinary nature of bioinformatics and expressed hope that this new knowledge will help specialists from various disciplines better understand the methods of experts from related fields in their daily work and establish collaboration to improve the quality of their work.