Functional Assessment of Identified Differentially Expressed Transcripts from ACS Patients

An essential part of a discovery science programme based on RNA analysis is to ascribe functions to the transcripts identified. Dr Chico has been funded by the CVBRU for 3 research PAs and he is the lead supervisor for Ms Sara Kohal, a fully funded CVBRU PhD student.

Ms Kohal is nearly halfway through her four year PhD. She has experienced 12 months of lab rotations followed by five months work on her PhD, studying the roles of genes found to be differentially expressed in patient leukocytes after acute coronary syndrome in the CVBRU collection on inflammation and vascular remodelling in zebrafish.

She is thus ascribing functional roles to genes discovered in humans, providing a bedside to bench translation. Ms Kohal has successfully completed a literature review and Research Training Programme.

Dr Chico’s scientific programme in this area produced three peer-reviewed publications acknowledging NIHR and two published abstracts.