Dr. Afshin Beheshti: MicroRNAs and COVID-19

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The Bioinformatics and Beyond Podcast

Leo Elworth

48 episodes

1 week ago

Hear from the leading experts in bioinformatics and other closely related fields. Topics discussed include computational biology, biotechnology, computer science, genetics, synthetic biology, math, statistics, and more. You can also find discussions on topics related to the scientific career field. For example, exploring career path options in science, or highlighting important skill sets such as writing and public speaking.

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Dr. Afshin Beheshti: MicroRNAs and COVID-19

The Bioinformatics and Beyond Podcast

29 minutes 21 seconds

4 years ago

Dr. Afshin Beheshti: MicroRNAs and COVID-19

Dr. Afshin Beheshti begins this episode by explaining what microRNAs are and why they are emerging as an important area of biological research. He then explains how microRNAs relate to viruses, which is a recently developing area of research in this already young field of study. Dr. Beheshti then tells the story of how he started to discover that microRNAs could be a driver of COVID-19 infections.

His story begins by using microRNA analysis tools to analyze COVID-19 infected patients from China which predicted a handful of microRNAs that could be involved in COVID-19 infection. He discusses how his team decided to focus on microRNA 2392 and how he continued to dig further into how it could be connected to COVID-19. His story then weaves through tales of successful collaborations with a large team of scientists that led to studying RNA samples from deceased COVID-19 patients, testing expressing the microRNA in healthy cells, analyzing multiple organs in COVID-19 infections, and testing a delivery system for a microRNA antagonist as a potential novel therapeutic.

We conclude with a quick discussion of the connection between microRNAs and space biology and space omics research.

Learn more about this work by checking out Dr. Beheshti's preprint on these topics: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.23.441024v4.abstract