Circadian rhythms in malaria parasites: DNA motif and gene expression regulation
Filipa Rijo-Ferreira, Professor
Public Health
Applications for Spring 2025 are closed for this project.
Earth rotation was an evolutionary pressure for organisms to evolve circadian rhythms in order to be able to anticipate the rhythmic day/night cycles. These circadian clocks regulate physiological properties such as sleep, immune response and metabolism. Our lab studies circadian clocks in parasites. This project focus on performing bioinformatics analysis to decode the rhythmic gene expression of the parasite, what are the key features that make sets of genes be co-expressed? We will analyze the DNA sequence at the promoter region to search for similarities in sequences of genes that are expressed together.
Role: Running bioinformatics packages to identify and test for motif enrichment of DNA sequences across different dataset of gene expression data from malaria parasites.
Qualifications: Computer science major or similar, coding and ability to run slurms for data analysis. Basic understanding of biological gene expression is also ideal.
Hours: 9-11 hrs
Related website: https://rijoferreiralab.com
Biological & Health Sciences Digital Humanities and Data Science