** NEW ** – (September 2025) –
Master’s semester project or lab immersion project
Title:
Gene Intolerance to Expression Variation
Description:
This project will explore how sensitive different genes are to changes in expression, a concept referred to as gene intolerance to expression variation. To address this, a Promoter Damage Index (PDI) will be developed by quantifying the impact of naturally occurring genetic variants in promoter regions using large-scale population datasets. By integrating information on regulatory annotations and evolutionary conservation, PDI will measure how much promoter variation is tolerated for each gene. The results will be benchmarked against existing intolerance metrics and gene prioritization tools, and combinations with these methods will be tested to assess whether predictive power for essential genes and disease associations can be improved.
Skills:
strong background in statistics and programming (e.g. R or Python) is needed.
contact: [email protected]
Master’s thesis project
Title:
Predicting Genetic Interactions with Contrastive Learning
Description:
This project will develop and evaluate machine learning approaches to predict genetic interactions, i.e., cases where the combined effect of mutations in two genes differs from what would be expected from their individual effects. The focus will be on applying contrastive learning to protein and gene representations, enabling the model to learn features that capture functional relationships and interaction patterns. Large-scale datasets of known genetic interactions will be used to train and benchmark models, and the learned embeddings will be tested for their ability to generalize to novel gene pairs and provide mechanistic insights into disease-relevant interactions.
Skills:
Strong background in machine learning, mathematics, and Python programming is required.
contact: [email protected]
********************************************************************
Master Thesis Projects
Master Thesis Projects are started once the 90 credits of master cycle are obtained.
Projects should last 17 weeks – they are worth 30 credits.
Master Thesis Projects must be done individually.
Semester Projects and Lab Immersions
LST and BIOING students may do one semester project and several lab immersion(s) during their Master studies.
Semester projects are worth 12 credits, lab immersion 8 credits.