From 17th of January to 10th February Kateryna Tarhonska, a young scientist from Poland (NIOM) had a pleasure to participate in the theoretical and practical Science and Technology (S&T) course, organized by Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). The course concerned learning a modern method of genotoxicity analysis using a combination of in vitro and computational methodology. Regardless of the difficult pandemic situation caused by COVID-19 we successfully conducted the sequent workshop of the TWINALT project. During the course, the young scientist enriched her knowledge of in vitro hepatic models (especially HepaRG cells) and learned the practical aspects of cell culture and treatment for genotoxicity tests. She became familiar with GENOMARK, one of the new approach methodologies (NAMs) to assess the damage to the genetic material – a transcriptomics based biomarker which uses the qPCR method. Finally, she got acquainted with an innovative method of analyzing the results of gene expression using a predefined script in R. The acquired knowledge and laboratory skills from a given course will directly contribute to the development of the techniques and research in the field of genotoxicity in NIOM.
