Simone Baseggio Email and Phone Number

Currently finishing the 1st year of the Master's in Biology, specializing in Molecular Biology and Genetics.I have taken courses in Molecular Genetics, Higher Model Organisms, Epigenetics and Cell Differentiation, Human Genetics, and Experimental Cell Biology, and plan to work on a master's thesis during most of the following academic year.

In the scope of my curricular Bachelor's thesis, I participated in a research project at the Computational Multi-Omics Lab, which is part of the UCIBIO Research Unit at the NOVA School of Science and Technology, under the supervision of Prof. Ana Rita Grosso and Prof. Paulo Caldas.The goal was to analyse the prevalence of Transcription Readthrough - a process characterized by deficient transcription termination which yields aberrantly long RNAs - in healthy human tissues, exclusively through computational approaches. This work ended up being published in January 2024 in the resulting scientific article, "Transcription readthrough is prevalent in healthy human tissues and associated with inherent genomic features”, freely available on Communications Biology.This project was an extremely enriching experience, as I have learned a lot about NGS methods, programming in R, handling large datasets obtained by RNAseq, Differential Gene Expression analyses and related statistics.

I received an "Introduction to Research" fellowship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, that allowed me to participate in a research project at the Molecular Mechanisms of Disease Lab, which is part of the UCIBIO Research Unit, under supervision of Prof. Helena Vieira and Prof. Daniela Pedroso.The scientific challenge was to uncover the role of ciliogenesis in carbon-monoxide induced astrocyte cytoprotection, which was assessed by targeting the gene IFT88. During my time at the lab, I had the opportunity to learn about and acquire experience in mouse astrocyte primary cell culture, immunocytochemistry, and flow cytometry, as well as resort to software like FlowJo, ZEN (Zeiss) and Fiji (ImageJ) to conduct analyses.By the end, I got to present the results of this work at a scientific symposium, organized by all the research fellows that took part in this initiative.

Volunteered in the "Ribeiras de Cascais" programme, where I treated samples of benthic macroinvertebrates collected from rivers in the Cascais municipality and analysed them as biomarkers to assess the water’s quality