Filip Horvat is a PhD student and a full-time computational biologist in the Petr Svoboda's Laboratory of epigenetic regulations at Institute of Molecular Genetics in Prague, Czech Republic. He completed the Molecular Biology study program at the Division of Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, Croatia in 2016. Filip is studying RNA dynamics during oocyte-to-embryo transition in mammals with aim to characterize evolution and function of different classes of RNAs and discover novel patterns in their expression and regulation. Beside mRNAs and other long (>200 nt) RNA molecules present in mammalian oocytes, he is investigating roles of small RNAs (21-30 nt) involved in three distinctive pathways mediating sequence-specific silencing of gene expression: RNA interference, micro RNA and PIWI-associated RNA pathways. Along with handling and analysing high-throughput sequencing data produced in-house, he is supporting his research by data mining publicly available data sets from NCBI and other online databases. In his everyday work, he extensively uses R programming language and various bioinformatics command line tools.
