Clinical Bioinformatics

Large-scale genome-wide association studies have uncovered many genetic variants related to immune-mediated diseases, but can only explain limited variation. Epigenetic changes in response to environmental exposure could also contribute to disease susceptibility.

How do genetic background, epigenetic variation and environment jointly influence the immune function and disease development? At which genetics locus? On what mechanism? Which pathways do they work on?

These are questions that Dr. Cheng-Jian Xu and his team are trying to answer by utilizing Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics approaches.

The MHH research group is part of the developing CiiM and currently housed at the TWINCORE in Hannover.