The genetic basis of the association between metabolic rate and neurodegeneration in Drosophila melanogaster

For the experimental evolutionary neurobiology laboratory, EPFL, Switzerland

This project is about the genetic link between metabolism, educational attainment and neurodegenerative disease: there’s been an observation that people with higher education attainment experience less neurodegeneration later in life, but this hypothesis is difficult to test in humans as educational attainment also highly correlates with the environment they live in (socioeconomic status). The project tries to first test this hypothesis in Drosophila Melanogaster to then extend it to mice and then to humans.

• Data processing and analysis on learning, metabolism and lifespan/neurodegeneration data obtained from DGRP lines.
• Bioinformatics and statistics to look for genetic correlations at the origin of these trait associations.

Python, R, DESeq2 package