Highlights of the 2^nd Bioinformatics Student Symposium by ISCB RSG-UK

Scope and format of the meeting

The symposium aimed to be a forum for students of all levels and early-career researchers in the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. Our aim was achieved by providing the opportunities for delegates to network and exchange knowledge with senior researchers, and also representatives from industry. The traditional scientific component of the meeting involved four sessions of oral presentations by students and post-doctoral researchers. The sessions also included three senior researchers as keynote speakers, a careers presentation and a scientific presentation from the ISCB Student Council founder, Dr. Manuel Corpas.

Prof. Dylan Edwards, Interim Director of The Genome Analysis Centre and Chair of Cancer Studies in the School of Biological Sciences at the nearby University of East Anglia, gave a welcoming address to the students and invited the chairs to begin the Symposium.

The RSG UK committee received more than 20 abstracts from students who wished to present their work at the Symposium. The submitted abstracts were peer reviewed by senior and junior researchers from different UK affiliations. The reviewers selected a total of six abstracts for oral presentations, and twelve abstracts for poster presentations. Overall, 50 delegates from 29 UK institutions attended the Symposium with international delegates travelling from as far away as the University of Würzburg, Germany.

All abstracts accepted for oral and poster presentations are available online, and we encourage delegates to submit their presentations to the ISCB Student Council channel on F1000Research- http://f1000research.com/channels/studentcouncil.

List of keynote speakers

Keynotes summary

Prof. van Heyningen delivered a presentation on recent genetic discoveries about developmental eye disorders, an area which she has focused her research on for many years. Her presence, as a pure biologist, was very much appreciated and welcomed by our audience, who were a representative mixture of the interdisciplinarity of bioinformatics. Providing insight into the ‘wet lab’ side of genomics research.

The second keynote speaker, Prof. Michael Stumpf, presented the first comprehensive mathematical model developed in their group which can describe the dynamic proteasomal protein degradation machinery by combining experimental data and computational modelling⁶. The model suggests that the transport of proteins into the proteasome limits how quickly the proteasome can degrade the proteins, thus revealing differences between the mechanisms of the standard and immuno-proteasomes. Prof. Stumpf highlighted that these findings can help scientists to design drugs for diseases linked to the proteasome machinery that would inhibit the function of immunoproteasomes and not the standard proteasomes.

Dr. Daniel Swan gave a lively and informative talk about his career experiences as his career has progressed. This included practical and wise advice about how to approach the research and development industry, and how to thrive in it. Some of his most memorable pieces of advice were to ‘never stop learning’ and to ‘do what you love’.

Finally, Prof. Michael Sternberg talked about enhanced methods to model protein structures and disease-associated missense mutations. Prof. Sternberg highlighted different computational methods that predict if a missense mutation is associated to a disease and how to identify these using computational tools and resources. The symposium delegates thoroughly enjoyed his keynote and the lively discussion after the talk.

Student and early-career researchers’ presentations

There were two presentations from post-doctoral research fellows and six presentations from current PhD students. In the first post-doctoral talk, Dr. Pirita Paajanen from The Genome Analysis Centre, UK, discussed her approach to tackling the validation of five ancient DNA samples from Cambridgeshire, UK, and her transition from mathematical thinking to bioinformatics. This presentation was based on the pre-print of a study investigating the impact of Anglo-Saxon migration on the current British population, using a genomics-based approach⁷. Dr. Paajanen addressed fundamental questions regarding our thinking about proof in bioinformatics compared to mathematics and the good experimental practices that can be applied to the field.

The second post-doctoral talk was delivered by Dr. Carl Barton, Queen Mary University of London, UK. Currently, the effect of epigenetics on aging, in any species, is not well understood. Dr. Barton presented a detailed assessment of epigenetic data provided to him from samples from dogs, and evaluated the statistical methods he used to analyse it.

In the student presentation section, Damjan Temelkovski, University of Westminster, UK, demonstrated his open-source cloud-based tool, Raccoon2, for the simulation of ligand-receptor binding interactions.

Charles Breeze, University College London, UK, presented eFORGE, a tool designed to aid and improve analysis of tissue specific markers in epigenome-wide association studies.

Henry Martell, University of Kent, UK, gave a fascinating talk on the role of assembly in cytogenetics of avian genomes and how this impacts our current understanding of avian evolution.

Matthias Haimel, University of Cambridge, UK, showed us his integrated platform for analysing large sets of variation and phenotypic data, and the potential of this in exploring the genetic cause of rare diseases in patients.

Ananth Surappa-Narayanappa, European Bioinformatics Institute, UK, gave us insight into his finding that protein domains can undergo extreme mutations that create functional domains.

Ricardo Humberto Ramirez Gonzalez, The Genome Analysis Centre/John Innes Centre, UK, informed us of his work on the next-generation sequencing of wheat to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) associated with yellow stripe rust resistance. He also described PolyMarker, a tool which can assist with designing primers for SNP assays in polyploid plant species.