Dr. rer. nat. Daniel Andergassen

Academic Career and Research Areas

Dr. Andergassen’s research bridges computational and experimental sciences to understand the impact of the non-coding genome on disease. Furthermore, his team aims to elucidate the contribution of sex chromosomes to sex differences in cardiovascular disease. Particular attention is given to those genes that escape female X chromosome inactivation, resulting in a higher gene dose in females (XX) compared to males (XY). To systematically elucidate the molecular mechanism for the CVD sex bias, the Andergassen lab quantitatively assesses the impact of sex chromosomes and hormones using sequencing approaches combined with disease and genetic models. The goal of this research is to identify novel sex-specific regulatory disease mechanisms with the aim of developing RNA-based therapies for sex-specific treatments.

Dr. Andergassen received his Diploma degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Vienna in 2012. He then completed his Ph.D. under the supervision of Denise Barlow, a driving force of epigenetics. In her lab at the Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM), he generated the most comprehensive map of allele-specific expression in the mouse, including the identification of all the imprinted genes. To accomplish this, he developed a bioinformatics pipeline to detect allele-specific expression from high-throughput sequencing data. To learn more about epigenetic regulation, he joined the lab of John Rinn and Alexander Meissner as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard (HSCI), where he focused his research on X-linked lncRNAs with sex-specific features. In another project, he targeted epigenetic key pathways in vivo, allowing him to uncover the imprinting mechanism genomewide. Since 2020, he has led an independent junior research group at the Technical University of Munich at the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology, aiming to understand the impact of the non-coding genome and sex chromosomes on disease.

Awards

• European Talent Academy fellowship (2023)
• DZHK Junior Research Group leader (2022)
• EMBO Short-Term Fellowship (2013)