Beatriz Garcia Santa Cruz, Dimitrios Kyriakis, Eleftheria Charalambous, Erica Grant and Mohaned Benzarti have recently been awarded the Pelican Grant from the Fondation du Pélican de Mie et Pierre Hippert-Faber. The grant will support their training and mobility activities in the context of their research projects.
For the 2020 Pelican Grant edition, five international students were awarded: Beatriz Garcia Santa Cruz from Spain who works at the Hospital Centre of Luxembourg (CHL), Dimitrios Kyriakis from Greece who works at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) and Eleftheria Charalambous, Erica Grant and Mohaned Benzarti respectively from Cyprus, USA and Libya who work together at the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH).
What is your research project about?
Beatriz: “My thesis applies state-of-the-art methods from machine learning and computer vision to solve biomedical imaging challenges, seeking to develop clinically suitable solutions for computer-aided diagnosis and prognosis of human diseases such as Parkinson disease or COVID-19. This is approached from a theoretical perspective through the systematic assessment of the factors that risk the generalisation and transportability of the solutions in rapidly evolving scenarios. On the other side, hands-on work involves biomedical data ranging from biological images such as high throughput screening microscopy to medical imaging 2D and 3D data. Such data is used to automatise quality control for biological analysis and to find biomarkers for objective diagnosis of PD, respectively.”
Dimitrios: “My PhD project focuses on the new technology of single cell multi-omic data. Thus, it requires high expertise in different technologies. Briefly, my project aims to describe a fetus single-nuclei transcriptomic atlas for the cortical plate, striatum, thalamus and hippocampus in four different developmental stages. We seek to identify enriched cell states in common or rare genetic risk of Schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and other neuropsychiatric disorders. To do so, we are analysing single nuclei of fetus brains during a critical period of development, to determine the gene expression. The analysis of this dataset will allow us to characterize the Cell states proportion of brain regions during development, track changes during the development and find associations between risk variants of neuro psychiatric disorders and cell populations. This atlas will help the community to understand the brain development of this critical timepoint of mid gestation by associating cell type expression profiles with specific disease risk.”
Eleftheria: “Microbial colonisation begins at birth, develops over the following 36 months, establishing stable tissue-specific microbiomes. My PhD research has already demonstrated that exposure to psychosocial adversity during this period leaves a clear mark on the microbiome. Once it is established, the microbiome goes on to play an important role in psychological and immunological development as well as influencing the overall health trajectory. My findings so far show strong evidence that the oral microbiome harbors a clear microbial signature of adversity. The ultimate goal of my research is to identify the functional differences of the oral microbiome and give mechanistic insight into the role of microbiota on the induction of this long-term disease risk.”
Erica: “I work in the frame of the Luxembourgish Fiber Cohort (LUXFICO) project, which was launched in February 2021 and is currently recruiting healthy volunteers who are randomly assigned to a controlled diet intervention that is low or high in fiber. One of the primary objectives of this research is to determine whether low fiber intake correlates with an increased activity of bacterial enzymes that contribute to the degradation of the protective mucus layer. Whereas previous research tends to highlight the benefits of a high fiber diet, this work will shed light on the mechanisms behind the negative consequences of a low fiber diet and evaluate whether increased consumption of dietary fiber might prevent diseases such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease.”
Mohaned: “Metabolism is an interlinked series of biochemical reactions that support biosynthesis, bioenergetics and redox balance on a cellular and a systemic level. One key metabolic pathway for proliferation is the one-carbon metabolism which is well documented to be upregulated in many tumours. Recent work by our group has shown that this metabolism is actually running in excess of the cell’s anabolic need, as it was observed that the one-carbon units were released outside of the cells as formate, suggesting other potential roles of serine catabolism. Interestingly, when cancer cells were cultured in nutrient stress conditions, they upregulated serine catabolism and formate overflow, indicating that this pathway is important in bioenergetics in these conditions.”
What will you do with the grant?
Beatriz: “This grant will help me conduct research visits abroad as well as attending summer schools, workshops and conferences on the topic of my thesis. In particular, events exploring clinical validation of AI systems and the integration of fairness, ethics, accountability and transparency.”
Dimitrios: “The Pelican Grant will fund my visit to the lab of Prof. Panagiotis Roussos at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. There, I will have access to single nuclei fetus data of four different brain regions (cortical plate, striatum, thalamus and hippocampus) in four different developmental stages. This research stay will boost my project as I will get additional training both in experimental and computational aspects and become familiar with data from different technologies, enhancing my methodology and research experience.”
Eleftheria: “The grant will fund my visit to the lab of Ines Thiele in Galway where I will model the oral microbiome of the EpiPath cohort. I will start with the metabolic reconstruction from salivary and buccal taxonomic profiles. Then, I will build the personalised models of the cohort. These will allow me to integrate and predict the impact of the changed environmental conditions that occurred early in life for the adoptees on the metabolic state of the target organism.”
Erica: “It will support my participation in a series of relevant training courses and conferences, allowing me to hone valuable bioinformatics skills for the analysis of multi-omics data generated in my mouse and human research projects. Specifically, this grant will cover a research stay in the lab of Dr Mani Arumugam at the University of Copenhagen, as well as training programmes at Columbia University and the participation on the Microbiome Keystone Symposium.”
Mohaned: “The award will be used to attend a training course held at Imperial College London in the field of Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry metabolomics. The course will include trainings on instrument set-up, method development, data acquisition and data analyses. Therefore, this training will allow me to design and implement these methods independently and immensely strengthen my skills.”
About the Fondation du Pélican
The Fondation du Pélican de Mie et Pierre Hippert-Faber was founded in 2010 by Pierre Hippert and is managed by the Fondation de Luxembourg. The foundation seeks to provide long-term support in the field of scientific and academic research, as well as in the area of the arts and letters. In particular, the foundation finances research projects at the University of Luxembourg by giving scholarships and/or purchasing equipment in biomedicine in order to promote research activities in Luxembourg and develop the reputation of the University in this field.
Each year, the Fondation du Pélican awards a number of doctoral candidates affiliated with the programme in systems and molecular biomedicine of the Doctoral School in Science and Engineering (DSSE) at the University of Luxembourg. The Pelican grant can be used to finance their research. It can cover additional experiments, travel expenses to participate in conferences and training workshops, as well as short-term stays abroad as part of research collaborations.