Individual
DC projects
Research project
The role of repeat elements in fat induced chronic liver inflammation and implications for NAFLD and HCC
Rationale and objectives:
Parting from strong preliminary data, we will unravel how fat-induced expression of noncoding L1 repeat RNA impacts chromatin structure and inflammatory response in NAFLD and HCC.
Therefore, we plan:
• To apply multiple epigenomic and other omics techniques to characterize human liver cells challenged with saturated fats.
• To correlate with changes in expression of L1 and other repeats and chromatin modifications at their promoters.
• To test L1 RNAs as mediators linking fat-responsive epigenome dynamics to the activation of inflammatory response.
Envisioned Secondments
UNIMI (Bonaldi) months 21-25 (4 months) to generate untargeted histone PTM profiles using MS and TFS (Strupat) months 30-31 (2 months) for training in performing and analyzing metabolomics.