The students of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology have just completed their Industrial Immersion with the bioinformatics department at the Genetico Center for Genetics and Reproductive Medicine.

Although the ongoing pandemic entailed a slight change in the training format, the students and the lab team struck up a close working relationship.

 

The students learned the ropes at the clinical genetics lab and tried their hand at setting up data processes. How do you find out whether a genetic variant affects the protein’s function? Can you see if a whole gene has been deleted looking at the NGS sequencing data? Where to look for signs of the Klinefelter syndrome? These are just a few of the practical challenges that the trainees had to deal with. They tried out a variety of tools to solve those tasks, getting the hang of the bioinformatics approaches that help determine the gender and the number of DNA copies from the NGS sequencing data and learning to use the tools that help predict the effects of genetic variants on proteins.

Daria Khmelkova, head of Genetico’s bioinformatics department, says: “We’ll be delighted to have Skoltech students on our team in the future.”

Ekaterina Khrameeva, professor at the Skoltech Center for Life Sciences (CLS), comments: “Industrial Immersion at the Genetico labs has garnered much positive feedback from my students. Working on projects that extended far beyond the scope of their graduation theses was both an exciting and useful experience that fosters self-development and broadens career horizons.”

Genetico’s labs boast advanced high-performance sequencers, robotic equipment and other resources for groundbreaking genetic research in medicine, genomics, and proteomics.

The Center’s state-of-the-art NGS laboratory inaugurated in 2017 offers fast and affordable genome sequencing research facilities comparable to those of many international labs in terms of cost efficiency.

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