A Ph.D. student from the University of Montpellier presented a scientific report at the Institute of Biophysics

On November 11, the next scientific seminar was held at the Institute of Biophysics of the Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

The seminar was opened by the Director of the Institute, Corresponding Member of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, Oktay Gasanov, who introduced the speaker and provided information about her to the seminar participants.

Then, the presentation by Türkan Səmədova, the winner of the competition under the "State Program for Increasing the International Competitiveness of the Higher Education System in the Republic of Azerbaijan for 2019-2023," and currently pursuing her doctoral studies at the University of Montpellier in France, was heard. The topic of the presentation was "Genomic study of immunoglobulin heavy chain in primates."

The young scientist mentioned that the main goal of her dissertation is to study the IGH chain in primates, as they are important model organisms for studying immune responses to viral infections such as HIV, ChickV, and Sars-CoV-2. "In the first year, we are performing the annotation and characterization of the IG heavy chain (IGH) of Lemur catta (Ring-tailed lemur). This characterization involves annotating and identifying genes that constitute the IGH locus, following the IMGT Ontology (Identification, Description, Classification, Numbering, Localization, Orientation and Obtention), and standardizing the nomenclature by determining their functions. IMGT is the international ImMunoGeneTics information system, and for this analysis, the 'Biocuration-pipeline' from IMGT is used. We start the annotation by extracting the locus from the selected 'assembly' using NCBI (BLAST), utilizing all IMGT resources. At the end of the work, we integrate the IG repertoire into the IMGT databases. Following the IMGT Ontology, we have annotated 102 genes (V, D, J, and C) of the Lemur IGH chain, and the results have been integrated into the open-access IMGT information system," said T.Səmədova.

At the end of her presentation, the young scientist answered questions related to the topic.