Nicolas Ruffini

About me

Nicolas Ruffini
PhD-student
ruffini@uni-mainz.de
Anselm-Franz-von-Bentzel-Weg 3, 55128 Mainz

Current projects

The Big Picture of Neurodegeneration

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), Huntington’s disease (HD), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are heterogeneous, progressive diseases with frequently overlapping symptoms characterized by a loss of neurons. Studies have suggested relations between neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) for many years, thus we gathered publicly available genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data from 177 studies and more than one million patients to detect shared genetic patterns between the neurodegenerative diseases on these three omics-layers. Our meta-study reveals highly significant processes in the identified set of 139 genes, common to all analyzed NDDs and might therefore contribute to the development of pharmaceutical measures against neurodegeneration in general.

These results marked the starting point of further research, again conducted in a team-effort with Susanne Klingenberg, to now find hallmarks emerging across four omics-layers in these four neurodegenerative diseases. We updated our genomic database and expanded our analysis to methylomic data. As we did not focus on the overlap common to all four diseases but to all significantly emerging genes we chose a network-based community detection approach to grasp the underlying subprocesses and hallmarks of neurodegeneration.

However, in addition to studying neurodegenerative diseases in a broad sense using publicly available datasets, I am also joining the analysis of experimental work on Alzheimer’s Diseases and multiple sclerosis, e.g. in RG Stroh. In addition to ongoing research, one paper on the detection of altered network dynamics in AD mouse models and its restoration using the drug Acitretin has been published here.

Methodological Work

As the accumulation of large amounts of data for comprehensive analyses relies heavily on standardized protocols and efficient analyses, I further worked on the development of analysis tools and helped proposing some general experimental guidelines to enable further acceleration and standardization of experiments and subsequent computational steps. The tools that I developed can be found on my github page (https://github.com/NiRuff/IntelliPy & https://github.com/NiRuff/ViNe-Seg ). The former, IntelliPy has been published here.

The analysis of calcium imaging data in RG Stroh led to the development of some analytical procedures that led to the ViNe-Seg tool, that is currently still under development but also to the publication of some experimental guidelines in a book chapter.

Further Work

Currently I am working on some extensions of my old projects but also on the following:

  • Establishment and analyses of long-term observation systems in stressed mice
  • Analysis of proteomic and methylomic alterations in aging individuals
  • Prediction of stressor response score based on proteomic data in humans

 

Publication

* equal contribution