Achievement

Mariann Micsinai began a rotation in the Carroll Laboratory at the NYU Cancer Institute, where one focus is childhood leukemia. The goal of Mariann’s project was to integrate acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) expression and SNP arrays datasets of two populations of children with and without Down syndrome. Mariann, applied to this database similar techniques to the one described above. She also used machine learning approaches to identify genes that are relevant to the separation between these two populations. Some of the genes that she identified were not found by other experienced bioinformaticians involved in this large project. Some of these genes are now being validated by other more accurate techniques. Last week we were informed that some of Mariann’s predictions were validated. These findings are an important step towards understanding why patients with Down syndrome and other patients who have similar copy number and expression profiles fall into a subclass of poor outcome.