About us > Dr. Sharmila Banerjee-Basu

 

The focus of my research is to gain a fundamental understanding of the molecular events that lead to neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism. We know that these complex disorders are caused by a combination of various factors acting in concert for pathogenesis. My specific interest is in establishing the contribution of genetics to these neurodevelopmental diseases. How does a particular genetic profile interact with environmental factors to develop a given disorder? I have been applying my broad research background in molecular biology and bioinformatics and my knowledge of protein structure-function relationships to establish molecular definitions of these neurodevelopmental disease processes.

To understand these complex neurodevelopmental disorders.in particular, autism.I and my colleagues at MindSpec have taken the strategy to translate vast amounts of genetic information into domains of molecular function. Our goal is to detect convergent molecular pathways that can serve as surrogates for drug development. We are building content-rich databases and novel computational tools for data mining, where the design of databases is rooted in the disease biology. Our ultimate goal is to integrate diverse pieces of molecular data with clinical information so that we can gain a systems-level understanding of a disease as complex as autism.

We are currently working on developing the various modules of our comprehensive database on autism, AutDB. We are gathering data from the diverse research areas on autism, such as genetics and animal models, in these modules. We apply statistical tools, meta-analysis, and new bioinformatics techniques like network analysis to the data. Our aim is to understand the statistical significance of these data sets. From there, we want to get a detailed understanding of the extent of interplay between the myriad factors that are involved in complex neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism.

Our ultimate goal is to build disease models for autism that are based on statistical significance. We are collaborating with researchers in basic science laboratories so they can test these statistically-significant disease models, an approach that differs from hypothesis-driven studies. Our approach is starting to bear fruit and we already have some publications due to come out in the near future in the peer-reviewed literature.