Bioinformatics School: results
Bioinformatics Summer School
Kirill Grigoriev, rusnanonetFrom July 29 to August 4, 2013, the First Summer School in Bioinformatics was held at Moscow State University and the Mendeleevo Hotel Complex.
The First Bioinformatics Summer School was attended by 100 students, postgraduates and young specialists of biological and technical specialties interested in the field of bioinformatics. In total, 403 applications were submitted from various cities of Russia and CIS countries, almost 3/4 of them claimed a place in the biologists' stream.
A distinctive feature of the school was its interdisciplinarity – the organizers united biologists and technical specialists on one educational platform. Each of the participants was able to get the knowledge that he needed – the program was designed for different levels of training. Joint lectures made it possible to study the most pressing issues of bioinformatics, and working in parallel streams helped to master basic knowledge from non-core disciplines. For example, programmers got acquainted with the introduction to molecular biology, biologists started programming.
On the first day, the school opened with a speech by key speakers:
- "Bioinformatic approaches to the study of microevolution" – Alexey Kondrashov (University of Michigan, Moscow State University);
- "Genetic reprogramming of somatic cells: what bioinformatics gives us" – Sergey Kiselyov (IOGen RAS);
- "Sequencing the Human genome as a tool for refining some anthropological and historical hypotheses" – Egor Prokhorchuk (Bioengineering Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences);
- "Molecular features of human brain evolution" – Philip Haitovich (Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences).
During the remaining days, the school's program was able to cover a wide range of issues: from the analysis of genome and transcriptome sequencing data to the features of somatic cell reprogramming, from a review of biotechnologies to the stages of brain development, as well as from the basics of programming and molecular biology to the analysis of gene regulation.
Most of the presentations are already available on the school's website, and video recordings of lectures will be added to the materials by the end of September.
As a result, the main tasks set by the organizers were fulfilled. The school contributed to the popularization of the most promising areas of bioinformatics and gave its participants the opportunity to gain knowledge commensurate with their current competence. In addition, new minds from different parts of Russia have joined the bioinformatics community. Next year, the organizers plan to continue similar educational initiatives, combining them with the St. Petersburg White Nights.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru19.08.2013