[Nov 29, 2018] SFU-Omics Group 17th Meeting - Goodbye 2018

For our last Omics meeting of the year, we were happy to have two awesome speakers from SFU, Dr. Fiona Brinkman (Professor, MBB) and Bruno Grande (PhD candidate, Morin Lab, MBB).

“A small virus plays a big role in the pathogenesis of Burkitt lymphoma” – Bruno Grande

Bruno is the lead analyst of the Burkitt Lymphoma Genome Sequencing Project (BLGSP). In his talk, he focuses on the role of a small virus called Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) on Burkitt Lymphoma (BL). BL is an aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma and is the most common pediatric cancer in equatorial Africa. EBV is associated with endemic BL. Using Whole Genome Sequencing data from over 100 tumours, with the representation of both endemic and sporadic BL, he demonstrates that EBV plays a big role in the pathogenesis of this disease than geographic origin or any environmental factors associated with geography. During his study, he observed significant differences after comparing EBV+ and EBV- cases (EBV status), which differences did not exist when comparing African and non-African (geography).

“Making predictions using microbiomes and microchips” - Dr. Fiona Brinkman

Dr. Brinkman started her talk by introducing the area of research in her lab, which is developing more sustainable approaches for infectious disease control. Since a disease results from a mixture of the presence of susceptible host, pathogen, and conducive environment, some of the projects include the study of anti-infective drugs and pathogen, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to find out ways to treat infections, and developing predictors (for example, IslandViewer for predicting genomic islands). One of her goals is to make user-friendly tools to enable researchers to be able to visualize their regions of interest in a user-friendly format. She also studies and uses microbiome as a marker, for example in the CHILD Study, which study obtains early life microbiome-based biomarkers and environmental exposure information to predict kids that are at risk of developing asthma and other allergic diseases and potentially treat them with therapeutic (microbes). She is also in collaboration with a lot of labs, working on beluga, frog, snow algae, and gut microbiome to study water quality, environmental toxicology, climate change, and impacts in cardiac transplants, respectively. In her talk, she also mentioned the code of conduct that she generates for bioinformatics predictors, for example, never force predictors and let the predictors to have an “unknown” option, ensure open-source predictors, and do more than one accuracy measure for evaluation of the tool.

Check out Dr. Brinkman's research page here: http://www.brinkman.mbb.sfu.ca/research/ and the new SFU Omics and Data Science Initiative: https://www.sfu.ca/odsi.html

See you in 2019!