Giulia Soldà obtained her MSc in Medical Biotechnology in 2001 (summa cum laude) and her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology in 2005 at University of Milan.
She was then awarded a two-year fellowship to work as visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. (Nov. 2005- Dec. 2007).
She became Assistant Professor of Applied Biology in 2008, first at the University of Milan (2008-2014), an then at Humanitas University (since Jan 2015).
Over the years, she participated to international courses at the European Molecular Biology Organization in Heidelberg (2008), Lipari International School on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2011), Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute/European Bioinformatics Laboratory (2014), allowing her to develop expertise in Next-Generation sequencing data analyses.
She received awards from the Italian Telethon Foundation (2005), the Italian Biology and Genetics Association (AIBG, 2005), the Italian Association for Human Genetics (SIGU, 2008). She is the author of 31 papers indexed in Pubmed, with over 700 citations and a mean impact factor of 5. H-index: 11 (ISI Web of Science) – 12 (Scopus) -13 (Google Scholar).
- The study of the molecular bases of human genetic diseases (e.g. non-syndromic sensorineural hearing loss, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease);
- Mechanisms of gene expression regulation, with a particular focus on noncoding RNAs, alternative splicing, and the nonsense-mediated mRNA decay pathway. I also have a specific expertise in the application of genomic and transcriptomic approaches to the identification of the genetic components of human inherited diseases.
Genetic bases of Inherited Hearing Loss
I am studying the molecular mechanisms underpinning inherited hearing loss – with a specific focus on the functional characterization of mutations affecting mRNA processing.
Moreover, I am interested in the application of NGS (mainly whole-exome sequencing) to the genetic diagnosis and the identification of new genetic determinants of nonsyndromic and syndromic (e.g. Perrault Syndrome, Alport Syndrome) hearing loss.
Role of non-coding RNAs in the pathogenesis of human diseases
I am interested in investigating the role of miRNAs and of long non-coding RNAs in the pathogenesis of different diseases: non-syndromic hearing loss, multiple sclerosis, PD, fascioscapulohumeral dystrophy, and myocardial infarction. In these pathological contexts, we try to identify non-coding RNAs that play a role in pathogenesis, to study their expression profile and biogenesis, to predict and experimentally validate their function and their interaction with the targets.
Main techniques:
Next-generation sequencing & Sanger sequencing, bioinformatics analysis of NGS data, genotyping, molecular cloning, transfection in eukaryotic cell lines (silencing and overexpression), real-time and digital PCR.
- Robusto M, Fang M, Asselta R, Castorina P, Previtali SC, Caccia S, Benzoni E, De Cristofaro R, Yu C, Cesarani A, Liu X, Li W, Primignani P, Ambrosetti U, Xu X, Duga S, Soldà G. The expanding spectrum of PRPS1-associated phenotypes: three novel mutations segregating with X-linked hearing loss and mild peripheral neuropathy. Eur J Hum Genet. 2015;23:766-73.
- Soldà G, Robusto M, Primignani P, Castorina P, Benzoni E, Cesarani A, Ambrosetti U, Asselta R, Duga S. A novel mutation within the MIR96 gene causes non-syndromic inherited hearing loss in an Italian family by altering pre-miRNA processing. Hum Mol Genet. 2012; 21:577-85.
- Mercer TR*, Wilhelm D*, Dinger ME*, Soldà G*, Korbie DJ, Glazov EA, Truong V, Schwenke M, Simons C, Matthaei KI, Saint R, Koopman P, Mattick JS. Expression of distinct RNAs from 3′ untranslated regions. Nucleic Acids Res. 2011;39:2393-403. *Shared first authorship. 2010 NAR Featured Article (top 5% of papers).
- Dinger ME, Amaral PP, Mercer TR, Pang KC, Bruce SJ, Gardiner BB, Askarian-Amiri ME, Ru K, Soldà G, Simons C, Sunkin SM, Crowe ML, Grimmond SM, Perkins AC, Mattick JS. Long noncoding RNAs in mouse embryonic stem cell pluripotency and differentiation. Genome Res. 2008; 18:1433-45.
- Soldà G, Makunin IV, Sezerman OU, Corradin A, Corti G, Guffanti A. An Ariadne’s thread to the identification and annotation of noncoding RNAs in eukaryotes. Brief Bioinform. 2009; 10:475-89.
