Credit: Oliver Dietze
In their study, which is now published in the journal
Nature Aging, they show that the level of non-coding RNAs in the blood of a Parkinson s patient can be used to track the course of the disease. For their study, the team led by bioinformatics professor Andreas Keller and his doctoral student Fabian Kern created and analyzed the molecular profiles of more than 5,000 blood samples from over 1,600 Parkinson s patients. This resulted in around 320 billion data points, which the researchers analyzed for biomarkers of Parkinson s disease using artificial intelligence methods. Our project is among the largest RNA biomarker studies in the world, says Andreas Keller, head of the research group for clinical bioinformatics at Saarland University and spokesperson for the Center for Bioinformatics at the Saarland Informatics Campus.