Exposome and Systems Biology in Human Health and Disease, 15 Credits

The course comprises two modules, ‘exposome in human health and disease’ and ‘systems biology and knowledge representation’.

The exposome is a concept used to describe environmental exposures that an individual encounters throughout life, and how these exposures impact biology and health. It encompasses both external and internal factors, including chemical, physical, biological, and social factors that may influence human health. The study of the exposome has become a useful tool in understanding the interplay between genetics and environmental factors in the development of diseases, with a particular focus on chronic conditions. The concept has been widely applied in fields such as epidemiology, toxicology, and public health, among others, and has led to significant advances in our understanding of disease etiology and prevention.

The key research themes included in the course are the use of state-of-the-art and emerging experimental techniques to assess how external (e.g., environmental chemicals, socioeconomic factors etc.) and internal (e.g., gut microbiome, metabolome, immune system status) exposures impact life-course health and mediate the risk of various diseases. Given the multi-layered complexity of data and information, systems biology approach is needed in order to understand how exposome impacts human health and disease.

Systems biology is about formalizing biological knowledge into computer models that can help us understand how system level functions emerge from biological mechanisms. By encoding biological knowledge in a strict format, systems biology enables the use of computation to reason about biological hypotheses. Hence, it has a clear interface with the Artificial Intelligence field of Knowledge Representation, which focuses on formalizing knowledge and enabling machine reasoning.

The systems biology module of the course will focus on techniques for finding and formalizing biological knowledge in knowledge models; on computational methods for visualizing and reasoning on those models; on using those models and tools to rationalize and understand biological functions; and on the systems biology cycle of prediction and experimental validation for model refinement.

ECTS Credits

15 Credits

Level of education

Second cycle, has only first-cycle course/s as entry requirements (A1N)

School

School of Medical Sciences