Overview

The Michal Linial's Lab is doing computational and wet, interdisciplinary biological research.

Our main focus is methodology development, combining knowledge in genomics and proteomics towards the understanding of molecular and cellular functions in health and disease.

Some of our current research aims

Cancer

  • Identifying predisposition and driver cancer genes.

The molecular basis of diseases

  • Finding promising treatments for the ageing brain through its gene expression signature.
  • Understanding the genetic and cellular causes of obesity, depression and autoimmune diseases.
  • Identifying genes impacted by de-novo and ultra-rare variations in autism.

Genetics through the lens of proteomics

  • Modeling the proteomic causes of human phenotypes and diseases using machine-learning.
  • Quantifying short-term human evolution via proteomic variation.
  • Inferring the clinical consequences of protein-interface mutations.

RNA regulation

  • Determining the regulatory significance of the alternative use of alleles in single cells.
  • Simulating the network of miRNA composition in cells.
  • Making sense of the presence of miRNAs at the nucleus.
  • Characterizing the long-term evolution of non-coding small RNAs.

Databases we work with

We mostly work with public large-scale databases, including:

  • The UK Biobank Extensive genomic, clinical and lifestyle data covering ~500,000 British individuals
  • The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Somatic and germline genetic variations in ~14,000 individuals across 33 cancer types
  • SFARI Phenotypic and genomic data of ~50,000 children with autism (and trios).