Karim Rahimi, PhD
Molecular Biology, Genetics, Biotechnology and
Artificial Intelligence
My curiosity in nature and biology started since I was growing up in a farmer family and small village in my motherland "Kurdistan". This interest deepened over time, and I found myself on an exciting journey teaching general biology as a high school teacher. Afterward, I earned a Master of Science degree in Biotechnology. Thereafter, I continued my education and achieved a PhD in "Molecular Biology and Genetics" in 2016 from Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Research Interests
Circular RNAs are a special group of non-coding RNAs. They play significant roles in neuronal development, cancer, and immunity etc. CircRNAs have attracted more attention recently and are a promising group of RNA molecules for therapeutic purposes. I have worked on circRNA biogenesis, their function in neurons. Recently, we revealed brain-derived circRNAs exon composition and splicing complexity using Nanopore long-read sequencing. This project was published recently in Nature Communications.
I am experienced and interested in Nanopore long-read sequencing and yet there are lots of questions at the genomic and transcriptomic level about the variations, repeat elements, and splicing events that need to be addressed. Additionally, Nanopore direct sequencing of DNA and RNA results in profiling the epigenetic markers and methylation patterns. This era of genome and transcriptome studies are highly interesting and potentially can reveal lots of complexities behind the gene expression regulation in response to stress, aging and any other environmental changes.
I have a strong experience in working with CRISPR and have focused on CRISPR-Cas13 and believe this technology can be very useful for high throughput research studies and therapeutics approaches in the near future.
The next level of NGS data analysis will be focused more on single-cell DNA and RNA sequencing. It will be highly informative if we collect this information as long-reads too. I am interested to design and develop new methods for single-cell long-read RNA and DNA sequencing. Recently, I have collaborated on projects to study the full length RNA isoforms at the single cell resolution and at the tissue specific level and also cancerous versus normal samples.
I am also very much interested but not limited to understanding complex questions in biology and diseases-caused agents and later, developing molecular tools to address those questions and to find/invent the best possible therapeutic tools.
I have also special interest in AI-ML and NLP-LLM cutting edge technologies for better understanding the complexity of biological pathways and gene regulations as well as for protecting and serving all mother languages including Kurdish.