Nelli Vardazaryan is a research student currently affiliated with the Nersisyan Lab. She is pursuing her master’s degree in Molecular and Cell Biology at the Institute of Molecular Biology of NAS RA. During OMICSS-2021, she began studying Bioinformatics. After graduating from summer school, she participated in her first research project through ABI’s Mentor and Mentee program in collaboration with Anna Hakobyan, a Ph.D. student at Max Perutz Labs, Austria. The research focused on oncogenic pathway alterations across large-scale cancer studies.
Currently, her research focuses on investigating the impact of external factors on the microbiome’s composition in both humans and animals. Specifically, she is involved in three distinct projects that aim to uncover the intricate dynamics of the microbiome.
- The first project involves the meta-analysis of metagenomics datasets to investigate the impact of geographical factors and pesticide/herbicide treatment on the gut microbiota of honeybees.
- For the second project, she is harnessing the power of mRNA degradome data to gain a deeper understanding of the direct effects of antibiotics on individual bacterial species in a complex microbial mixture.
- Her third project focuses on evaluating the changes in the composition of oral bacteria under the influence of cigarette and e-cigarette smoke through the analysis of metagenomics and (meta)degradomics datasets, funded by a research grant from the EIF.
Additionally, Nelli volunteered during the OMICS 2022 Summer School.