Summary of Third Meeting – May 25th, 2017

Post date: Jun 8, 2017 3:12:07 AM

There was about twenty people at the third Omics Club meeting, including a lot of new faces!

What is everybody working on?

With so many new people present at the meeting, we took some time to do a quick survey of peoples areas of research to get a better idea of where everyone is coming from. Many people have either a computer science or biology background, with a few interesting exceptions such as statistics and medical imaging.

Round table to discuss current research challenges:

Having a group with such a diverse set of experiences came in very handy when it came time to discuss some of the challenges we were facing in our research. We had some great discussion on topics such as detecting viral insertions into a genome, detecting cancer in tissue images, and transcript assembly.

Talks:

Dr. Faraz Hach

Dr. Hach gave a great summary of part of his research which was how small variations in coding regions can generate new proteins that often lead to disease, and his efforts to detect these variations using “MiStrVar” a tool developed by him and his lab.

Thea Van Rossum

Thea had an engaging presentation about the “Invisible Microbiome,” how microbes are everywhere in our lives, how we quantify them, and how this can have broad implications in many fields.

Elijah Willie

Elijah gave an excellent talk on his study of the different strains of Borrelia Burgdorferi, a pathogenic bacteria found in the Ixodes tick that causes Lyme disease.