Projects

The goal is to study new solutions & principles for electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) with significantly improved metrological and functional characteristics, like higher measurement accuracy, resolution and speed, lower power consumption and wider frequency and dynamic ranges. New solutions enhance the existing and enable new applications of EIS in healthcare, biology and industries. The principles & solutions to measure biological & physiological properties of organs, tissues and microorganisms/pathogens, as well as of composites, alloys etc. are the subjects of the research. Unique low-cost low-power miniaturized high-resolution and flexible measurement components with various connectivity (IoT, BAN etc) will be created by new EIS groundings. An important R&D aspect is synchronous signal processing and communication in EIS sensor-arrays. Research aspects: sampling theory AI/ML) and metrology (eg novel calibration techniques, methods of implementation in biology and medicine.

Enhancers are short distal cis-regulatory DNA regions that drive expression of a gene. However, enhancers do not function exclusively as DNA entities. Activated enhancers are transcribed by RNA polymerase II (RNAPII), which produces enhancer-derived RNAs (eRNAs). Production of eRNA creates additional trans-regulatory mechanisms facilitated by DNA-RNA, RNA-RNA, or protein-RNA interactions. Due to eRNAs’ fast degradation rates, and lack of robust and standardized sequencing methods, reports about the molecular nature of eRNA molecules and their processing are conflicting, making mechanisms of gene regulation by eRNA controversial. Even less is known about co- and post-transcriptional processing of eRNA. This project aims to overcome the controversy and fill the knowledge gap by studying a well-defined experimental system, cultured rat cortical neurons, and activation of immediate-early gene (IEG) response, perturbing the core eRNA endonuclease and combining this with eRNA-tailored sequencing, computational and biochemical methods. The developed integrative approach will reveal molecular features of eRNA molecules and their precursors genome-wide, opening the opportunity to study eRNA biogenesis to further understand molecular mechanisms behind the eRNA-mediated gene regulation.

The IDEA Project focuses on digitalisation and predictive justice, which can be applied in labour law disputes, both in European and national contexts. We aim to develop a digitalised procedure and a platform to address harmonisation across digitalisation and predictive algorithms in access to justice, encompassing interaction with the forthcoming EU legislations on the Digitalisation of judicial operation and access to justice and the AI Act and to verify it together with six judicial authorities and numerous practitioners. This method has an innovative character – combining legal analysis with broad text mining techniques – as it will unravel the concept of predictivity to assess the (in)compatibility with the rule of law in civil law systems.

CREA3 aims to introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven tools to assist EU citizens in resolving disputes by applying innovative game theoretical (GT) algorithms. To improve access to justice and interaction with the rule of law, we seek to develop a strategy that addresses harmonisation across digitalisation and predictive algorithms. This approach, which combines legal research with extensive text-mining techniques, is novel since it will explore the idea of testing and evaluating how well family law systems in six EU legislations adhere to the new forthcoming “Regulation on the digitalisation of judicial cooperation and access to justice in cross-border civil, commercial and criminal matters”.

How do neurons maintain their function throughout life? Neurons are born early in development and are not regenerated during an individual’s lifetime. Therefore, after maturation, our neurons must remain functional throughout life, which in humans can be up to a hundred years of more. The goal of my ERC Starting Grant 2024 proposal EpiNeuroLife was to uncover how the formation of the epigenetic landscape during neuronal maturation contributes to the maintenance of neuronal gene expression and function during adulthood and ageing. My preliminary studies show that developing neurons in the mouse cerebellum accumulate extremely high levels of the repressive histone modification H3K27me3 during maturation, which I hypothesise is critical for regulating chromatin compaction and neuronal gene expression later in life. In MOB3ERC113, I will generate supporting data for my ERC application to uncover the mechanisms of H3K27me3 deposition in neurons.

This project studies new dependently typed systems suitable for the development and mechanization of programming language semantics. Particular emphasis is given to languages supporting concurrency and non-determinism, such as transition systems and process calculi. Popular proof assistants based on dependent type theory, such as Agda and Coq, are inadequate for the formal verification of the denotational semantics of such languages because of their insufficiently expressive type systems. We address this issue by extending modern type-theoretic frameworks, such as homotopy type theory, with a new class of coinductive types coming from final coalgebras of accessible functors. In denotational semantics, these types are necessary for handling the non-deterministic and continuously-interactive behavior of processes. The resulting more expressive type systems will prove themselves capable of encoding the formal semantics of various languages with concurrency and non-determinism.

Communication between cells in ovarian follicle is a prerequisite for oocyte maturation and ovarian functions, disturbances of which lead to infertility. Polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) and poor response to hormonal stimulation in infertility treatment are types of subfertility of ovarian aetiology. The current project addresses the importance of intercellular communication in human ovarian follicle by combining various RNA sequencing methods (RNA-seq) with systems biology analysis. The full-length single molecule RNA-seq will be exploited to characterize the mRNA isoform map of ovarian granulosa cell populations. MicroRNA profile of cells and follicular fluids will also be analysed. Single-cell RNA-seq will describe immune cell populations in the ovarian pre-ovulatory follicle. The datasets will be integrated to model communication between follicular cells to reveal signalling pathways disturbed by (post-)transcriptional events in PCOS and poorly responding IVF patients.

PIMENTO Promoting Innovation of ferMENTed fOods The long-term goal of PIMENTO is to place Europe at the spearhead of innovation on microbial foods, promoting health, regional diversity, local production at different scales.