Shirleny Romualdo Cardoso

With many years dedicated to cancer research, my core competencies in research supervision, molecular biology, and cell culture techniques have positioned me as a valuable contributor at The Institute of Cancer Research. My mission is to advance the understanding of breast cancer genetics, aligning with our team's commitment to ground-breaking discoveries. My field of expertise in genomics, coupled with my current role, allows me to bring diverse perspectives and innovative approaches to our collaborative research environment.

In my tenure at The Institute of Cancer Research, I have played a pivotal role in characterizing genetic variants associated with breast cancer, employing a suite of advanced techniques such as whole genome bisulphite sequencing and capture HiC. My efforts have enabled significant strides in our understanding of cancer susceptibility, reflecting my adeptness in genomic analysis and my capacity to contribute meaningfully to high-impact research endeavors.

In my current role, I have been involved in innovative research on breast cancer risk. My work within the team has contributed to the characterisation of genetic variants associated with breast cancer susceptibility, initially identified through genome-wide association studies (GWAS), and expanded my experience in sequencing, epigenetics, cell culture and cloning techniques. Using techniques including whole genome bisulphite sequencing on primary mammary epithelial cells, capture HiC and luciferase reporter assays on murine HC11 mammary epithelial cells, pyrosequencing and cloning of enzymatically converted methyl DNA from peripheral blood cells, fast Global Run-On sequencing optimisation on epithelial breast cancer T47D cells and mammary fibroblast GS2 cells to try to identify nascent RNA (including nuclei isolation methods and Drosophila melanogaster S2 cell culture to use as spike in), I have contributed to significant advancements in our understanding of breast cancer biology (Cardoso et al, 2022, British Journal of Cancer). My computational skills include proficiency in GraphPad Prism, Python, R, Adobe PhotoshQueen Mary University of Londonop and Adobe Illustrator.

During my doctoral research, I focused on blood cancer. The overall aim of my project was to identify and characterise disease causing gene variants (using NCBI, Ensembl, UCSC Genome Browser, ExAC, Polyphen-2, MutationTaster-2, among others) that could lead to familial MDS/AML in the uncharacterised familial MDS/AML cases using whole exome and target sequencing. A number of key findings led to publications, including two first author manuscripts (Cardoso et al. 2016, Leukemia; Cardoso et al. 2017, Haematologica). I had the opportunity to work with DNA, RNA and protein preparation; whole exome, target and Sanger sequencing and data analysis; primer design for gene analysis; restriction enzyme digestion; RT-qPCR; Southern and Western blotting; HPLC based techniques; and transformation of human B-cells using EBV virus. I also had experience in bioinformatics by aligning raw sequencing files and performing variant calling using Python; and by analysing whole exome sequencing data.