Lab of bioinformatics and computational genomics

I started my education as a bio-engineer at Ghent university out of interest in bioscience and the aim to obtain a general scientific education. The passion for molecular biology led to a masters with the specialization of cell-and gene biotechnology. During my thesis, I worked on the optimization of the detection of sORF-encoded peptides by analyzing biases in extraction protocols (VIB center for Medical Biotechnology, Prof. Van Damme) and by performing a comparative analysis of two prediction pipelines (BioBix, dr. Menschaert). This combination of experimental work and bio-informatics analyses triggered my interest for data-analysis of OMICs data and improved my skills in integrated research.

The search for micro-peptides will be continued in my PhD, where I will focus on screening of high throughput data for (functional) sORFs. I aim to identify functional micro-peptides in C.elegans and the human genome by analyzing putative candidates obtained from earlier performed experiments and data availible in literature.