We will host guests, mostly online, in the seminar in Spring 2025. Between the public seminars, students will prepare their own presentations for class only. The themes for student presentations this semester will be i) bioinformatics approaches to non-B DNA, and ii) bioinformatics for long-read sequencing and structural variant detection. Public seminar guests will be shared with a “sister seminar” at CEITEC, described here:

The Bioinformatics Seminar is a seminar series organized together with the Faculty of Informatics in the interdisciplinary fields of Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, and Computational Biology. The seminar series aims to invite exciting speakers working on current (state-of-the-art) bioinformatics problems. The goal is to broaden bioinformatics knowledge for scientists and students and promote mutual connections and interactions between bioinformaticians at MU. The seminars are held alternately at the CEITEC MU (E35/211) and FI MU (A319) and also streamed online every other Wednesday from 16:00.

Link to CEITEC Bioinformatics Seminar webpage

Please join us for the public talks below, either in person (see room numbers above) or using the MSTeams platform (click on the respective title below). All times are Central European (Prague, Vienna, Budapest). Contact lexa @ fi.muni.cz or vojtech.bystry @ ceitec.muni.cz for additional information.

19.2. 4 PM

FI MU
Introduction to the seminar
Students Only

26.2. 4 PM

Thesis Report (FI MU) Šimon Ondrejka
A computational tool for basecalling from nanopore sequencing data in genomes with tandem repeats

5.3. 4 PM

Invited Talk (FI MU)
Hana Resovska, FI MUNI, Brno, Czech Rep
Artificial Intelligence has become an important tool in radiology, helping improve medical image analysis by supporting doctors in detecting and diagnosing diseases more accurately and effectively. This study explores and evaluates various medical image analysis techniques, with a primary focus on object detection in radiological brain scans. Specifically, it examines widely used methods for medical image segmentation and assesses their performance on a publicly available brain tumor dataset. The results are compared with existing research to determine their effectiveness. Furthermore, the most successful approaches are applied to real-world cases, including brain stroke detection in mice and brain tumor identification in human MRI scans.
Enhancing Brain Pathology Diagnostics Through Medical Image Analysis

12.3. 4 PM

FI MU Journal Club.
TBD
Student presentations (Students Only)

19.3. 4 PM

Invited Talk (online)
Andrea Guarracino
**
TBD - pangenomes, pangenome-derived variation

26.3. 4 PM

FI MU Journal Club.
TBD
Student presentations (Students Only)

2.4. 4 PM

FI MU Journal Club.
TBD
Student presentations (Students Only)

9.4. 4 PM

FI MU Journal Club.
TBD
Student presentations (Students Only)

16.4. 4 PM

FI MU Journal Club.
TBD
Student presentations (Students Only)

23.4. 4 PM

Invited Talk (FI MU)
Angelika Lahnsteiner (Salzburg Univ, Austria)
The global rise in obesity and its association with metabolic diseases (MetDs) as well as their elevated cancer risk pose them a major health challenge. While the mechanisms driving MetD progression remain unclear, both genetic and environmental factors, including DNA methylation, play key roles. Emerging evidence suggests that deregulated DNA methylation and G-quadruplexes (G4s) contribute to the observed deregulated transcription patterns. To investigate their impact, we analyzed DNA methylation in 160 MetD patients versus controls, focusing on overlaps with G4 formation and alternative promoter usage.

Illumina MethylationEPICv2 arrays (~900,000 CpGs) identified significant differential methylation in regulatory regions enriched for predicted G4 motifs. These regions overlapped with differentially methylated sites and deregulated alternative promoters in cancer. Using permanganate/S1 nuclease footprinting with direct adapter ligation (PDAL-Seq) and circular dichroism spectroscopy, we confirmed G4 formation in hypomethylated regions and identified a transcription factor and epigenetic regulator associated with these sites. Targeted in vitro studies revealed that loss of methylation promotes G4 formation and activates alternative promoters in regulatory elements, whereas methylated regions lack these functions.

Our findings provide new insights into the mechanistic link between MetDs and cancer, highlighting non-B DNA structures as key contributors to disease progression.

The lecture is part of the Bioinformatics Seminar Series, which aims to invite exciting speakers working on the current state-of-the-art bioinformatics problems.
G-quadruplexes are sites of differential methylation and alternative promoter usage in metabolic disorders and cancer

30.4. 4 PM

Invited Talk (CEITEC)
Stephanie Sammut / Dimosthenis Tzimotoudis, University of Malta
**
TBD

7.5. 4 PM

Invited Talk (FI MU)
Alessia Petescia, PhD student, Computational Biology, FMFI Comenius University Bratislava
**
TBD

14.5. 4 PM

FI MU Journal Club.
TBD
Student presentations (Students Only)

Related Articles:

• 2024/02/09   IV106 Bionformatics seminar
• 2023/09/25   IV105 Bionformatics seminar - Fall 2024
• 2023/09/05   IV105 Bionformatics seminar - Fall 2023
• 2023/02/07   IV106 Bionformatics seminar
• 2022/08/30   IV105 Bionformatics seminar - Fall 2022