Why do men and women differ in disease susceptibility and presentation of long-COVID and ME/CFS? One clue is that these are similar to autoimmune disorders, where most sufferers are also women. In autoimmune disease, the body is attacking itself rather than foreign invaders. Could this also be the case in some types of long-COVID or ME/CFS? And what roles do the sex-chromosomes play in this? The immune component, and the known sex differences there, are a potential avenue to further explore. We aim to look at the different immune cells in both long-COVID and ME/CFS individuals, using computational methods to learn the different features of the diseases in a sex-specific way.
School
Computer Science and Engineering
Research Area
Bioinformatics | Network analysis | Sex differences | Post-viral illnesses | Long-COVID | ME/CFS
- Research environment
- Expected outcomes
- Supervisory team
- Reference material/links
The research team for this project consists of Dr Sara Ballouz from CSE and collaborators from the Kirby institute.
It is anticipated that this research will provide characteristics of both long-COVID and ME/CFS at the symptomatic, molecular and cellular level. This work aims to find sex specific variations in cell-types, genes, gene interactions and biomarkers.
- Phetsouphanh, C., Jacka, B., Ballouz, S. et al. Improvement of immune dysregulation in individuals with long COVID at 24-months following SARS-CoV-2 infection. Nat Commun 15, 3315 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47720-8
- Lee J; Shah M; Ballouz S; Crow M; Gillis J, 2021, 'CoCoCoNet: Conserved and comparative co-expression across a diverse set of species', Nucleic Acids Research, 48, pp. W566 - W571, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/NAR/GKAA348