METATRANSCRIPTOMICS

Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine – An interdisciplinary research center

Founded in 2003, the University of Luxembourg (UL) is a public institution and the first and only university of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It was set up as a multilingual and international institution and is strongly focused on research. Research focuses on a choice of priority areas. Within these priorities, the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) was created and is a centre stone in the ‘Luxembourg Health Science Plan' to transform the country into a research and technology hub within Europe and beyond. The LCSB aims at unravelling the biological mechanisms underlying health and disease with a special emphasis on neurodegenerative diseases using molecular analyses and bioinformatics tools and computational models.

The Systems Ecology (SE) group

The Systems Ecology (SE) group within the LCSB spans a broad spectrum of expertise ranging from ecology, microbiology, molecular biology, cell biology, bioinformatics to engineering. The SE group has extensive experience in integrated multi-omic studies on various microbial environments, such as bioleaching, wastewater treatment, and human-borne microbiota. These studies involved, among others, the comparison of the respective microbiota under different conditions (“case vs. control”) as well as over time in order to identify the discriminating “factors”, e.g., keystone species or keystone genes.

Role of SE group in PROSPECTOMICS

The SE group is the Project lead on biomolecular extractions and next-generation sequencing. In the extraction sub-project, we will extract DNA, RNA, and proteins from marine sedimentary samples. Jointly with the GFZ, we will develop novel approaches for the extraction of biomolecules and optimized protocols to ensure high-quality extracts. The extracts will subsequently be subjected to high-throughput molecular measurements to generate multi-omics data (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and metaproteomics) for the other sub-projects. Extracting the biomolecules from single, unique samples is an important aspect in the downstream integration of the multi-omic data.