Yuxin Mi

FUNCTIONAL GENOMICS IN SEPSIS

Significant heterogeneity in individual patient response in sepsis has posed great challenges for identifying appropriate therapeutic strategies and makes it urgent to now develop personalized therapy. Former work of the group has distinguished two response groups among sepsis patients through transcriptomic profiling, and identified specific sepsis regulatory genetic variation (eQTL) involving the immune and metabolic response. To follow up on this work, I will perform further functional genomic analysis to gain a better understanding towards the inter-individual variation in sepsis outcome and the underlying immunological conditions. Particularly this will involve: exploring sepsis plasma proteomics in an expanded cohort and integration of proteomic, transcriptomic and genomic data; validation of SRS assignment in larger combined cohorts starting with defining a medium-throughput customized gene expression panel; characterization of microRNA profiles in context of sepsis.

Before I started my DPhil study here I obtained my BSc in Biological Sciences degree from Peking University with Outstanding Graduate Award of Beijing Higher Educational Institutions. For my undergraduate study I initiated the project “Construction of photo-controllable mitochondria via protein engineering”. Before that I worked to develop genetically-encoded fluorescent indicators for specific neurotransmitters. I also undertook a summer internship at Nuffield Department of Medicine which was focused on assessing antigen presentation from malaria infected liver cells..