[May 17, 2018] SFU Omics Group 11th Meeting – Kissing Bugs

Post date: May 18, 2018 7:21:22 PM

For the summer semester, we will be having one presenter per meeting to facilitate more time for discussion.

“Comparative Genomics of Kissing Bugs” – Nicolas Salcedo

Nicolas studies Kissing Bugs, which are a vector in Chagas disease. In his talk, he demonstrated how he uses bioinformatics approaches like reciprocal BLAST and HMM profile search to learn more about the missing IMD pathway genes. He also studies the evolution of IMD genes and found that they cluster surprisingly closely to bees and ants than expected.

We had some great questions from engaged audience members about the potential to use other sequencing technologies, which other pathways could be involved, applications to controlling diseases, potential in studying the microbiome, and many more!

Afterwards, we had a round table discussion about what everyone was working on and some challenges they encountered recently.

We finished the meeting with discussing how to better connect people to those with the relevant skills and knowledge.