Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology

Publications

• Book

  Alshanskaia E., Martynova O.

  2023 Fifth International Conference Neurotechnologies and Neurointerfaces (CNN) 18-20 Sept. 2023

   Cognitive and emotional load in the course of increasing the complexity of tasks leads to the activation of various parts of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and can be accompanied by an increase in the efficiency of problem solving. An increase in cognitive load under the condition of high motivation is a stress factor and is expressed in a different reaction of the sympathetic and parasympathetic links in response to the load. This study explored the ANS reactions by measuring the pupil size of 61 healthy sub-clinical volunteers in response to the gradually increasing complexity of tasks. The experiment included 3 blocks of a combined visual search and 1-back task with six levels of difficulty. K-mean clustering method was used for the analysis. An increase in the complexity of the task from the first to the sixth level led to different dynamics of the pupil size in the three clustered groups. In one group, an intense high switchability and an active reaction with a large amplitude of changes were visible, in the second group the dynamics of changes was minimal, and a third intermediate group was also identified. Our results highlight individual differences in the reaction of the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of ANS under cognitive workload depending on biometric and psychometric parameters. 

  IEEE, 2023.

• Article

  Knyazev E., Timur Kulagin, Antipenko I. et al.

  scRNA-seq of preeclamptic trophoblasts identifies EBI3, COL17A1, miR-27a-5p, and miR-193b-5p as hypoxia markers: validation of neuradapt as a superior mimetic to cobalt chloride

  Background. Preeclampsia (PE) complicates 2–8% of pregnancies and involves placental hypoxia and HIF-pathway activation, especially in early-onset PE (eoPE). Chemical mimetics like cobalt(II) chloride (CoCl2) and oxyquinoline derivatives model trophoblast hypoxia in vitro, yet their fidelity in recapitulating PE gene profiles remains unclear. Integrating patient tissue analyses with experimental models may reveal common markers and validate physiologically relevant paradigms.

  Methods. We analyzed scRNA-seq data from 10 eoPE, 7 late-onset PE, and matched control placentas, identifying villous cytotrophoblast, syncytiotrophoblast, and extravillous trophoblast (EVT). BeWo b30 cells were treated for 24 h with CoCl2 (300 µM) or the oxyquinoline derivative neuradapt (5 µM) to induce hypoxia. RNA-seq with qPCR validation and small RNA-seq quantified mRNA and microRNA changes; PROGENy inferred pathway activities.

  Results. scRNA-seq revealed highest hypoxia activation in eoPE, with EVT showing maximum activity. Nine genes were upregulated across all trophoblast types (EBI3, CST6, FN1, RFK, COL17A1, LDHA, PKP2, RPS4Y1, RPS26). In vitro, neuradapt induced more specific hypoxia responses than CoCl2 (1,284 vs. 3,032 differentially expressed genes). Critically, EBI3, FN1, and COL17A1 showed concordant upregulation in tissue and neuradapt-treated cells, whereas CoCl2 produced opposite patterns. MicroRNAs hsa-miR-27a-5p and hsa-miR-193b-5p were consistently elevated in both models; 3'-isoforms of hsa-miR-9-5p and hsa-miR-92b-3p were identified as hypoxia-associated.

  Conclusions. EBI3, COL17A1, miR-27a-5p, and miR-193b-5p emerge as trophoblast hypoxia markers. Neuradapt (a selective HIF-prolyl hydroxylase inhibitor) provides a more physiologically relevant in vitro model than CoCl2, recapitulating transcriptomic signatures observed in PE placentas. This integrated approach advances understanding of PE pathophysiology and therapeutic targeting.

  Placenta. 2026.

• Book chapter

  Klenitskiy A., Fatkulin A., Denisova D. et al.

  Encode Me If You Can: Learning Universal User Representations via Event Sequence Autoencoding

  Building universal user representations that capture the essential aspects of user behavior is a crucial task for modern machine learning systems. In real-world applications, a user’s historical interactions often serve as the foundation for solving a wide range of predictive tasks, such as churn prediction, recommendations, or lifetime value estimation. Using a task-independent user representation that is effective across all such tasks can reduce the need for task-specific feature engineering and model retraining, leading to more scalable and efficient machine learning pipelines. The goal of the RecSys Challenge 2025 by Synerise was to develop such Universal Behavioral Profiles from logs of past user behavior, which included various types of events such as product purchases, page views, and search queries.

  We propose a method that transforms the entire user interaction history into a single chronological sequence and trains a GRU-based autoencoder to reconstruct this sequence from a fixed-size vector. If the model can accurately reconstruct the sequence, the latent vector is expected to capture the key behavioral patterns. In addition to this core model, we explored several alternative methods for generating user embeddings and combined them by concatenating their output vectors into a unified representation. This ensemble strategy further improved generalization across diverse downstream tasks and helped our team, ai_lab_recsys, achieve second place in the RecSys Challenge 2025.

  In bk.: RecSysChallenge '25: Proceedings of the Recommender Systems Challenge 2025. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2025. P. 26-30.

• Working paper

  Liutsko L., Malova Y., Vinokurova E. et al.

  Stress Resilience (Proprioceptive and Verbal Individual Differences) in Onco-Patients, Sportsmen and Controls

  The characteristics of response to stressful situations depend on a complex of factors such as personality traits, emotional regulation, health state, features of the nervous system, motor functions and proprioception. In cases of disruption of the brain's dopamine system due to disease or chemotherapy, hormone discharge due to stress, changes in emotions and proprioception may occur. The aim of our study was to find the relationship of stress resilence in verbal test and individual differences performed in proprioceptive test in onco-patients, sportsmen and group of control; as well as to observe the differences between these groups in the verbal stress resistance and individual differences proprioceptive tests. The results showed that onco-patients were less resistant as per verbal stress resistance outcomes for a major part of variables compared to other groups. The sportsmen were superior in verbal Risk and Control dimensions compared to other groups; but less in Positive Affectiveness. The proprioceptive test perfomance revealed the only statistically significant difference in performance in the dimension related to Mood, showing more Pessimism in the sportsmen group, but more Optimism in the oncopatients at temperamental (or intrisinc) level. The obtained results can be used by psychologists, therapists, coach and healthcare when needed to attend the specific needs of public, being pateints or sportsmen, etc.

  public health and health services. 20944. MDPI, 2023