Bioinformatics School – 2019
The summer school "Bioinformatics in research of development and aging" was held from July 29 to August 3 in Dolgoprudny
Halimat Murtazalieva, Institute of Bioinformatics
From July 29 to August 3, 2019, the seventh bioinformatics summer school was held in Dolgoprudny on the basis of MIPT. Every year, 100 students and young scientists in the field of mathematics, computer science, biology and medicine take part in the school, which are divided into two streams: computer scientists-mathematicians and biologists-physicians.
The competition for the school is consistently high. Candidates undergo a serious selection process: an introductory online course and a questionnaire contest. This year the school brought together participants from 38 cities and 9 countries of the world – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, France, Germany, Korea, China and the USA.
The main topic of the school in 2019 was bioinformatics in research on aging and development. The use of bioinformatic methods has made it possible to make a significant breakthrough in these areas, since studies of complex processes often require system computational analysis. At the moment, research is widely conducted in the world to search for patterns of epigenetic changes characteristic of development and aging, new molecular signatures and markers associated with these processes are identified, the influence of various environmental factors and interventions is analyzed. Despite this, aging remains one of the most intriguing mysteries of biology and poses a wide range of challenges to researchers.
In the school program, lectures alternated with practical courses. The purpose of the school is to give participants not only an overview of the field, but also an understanding of the basic principles of the methods, to teach them how to use useful programs and packages, solve specific computational problems and set a vector for further development in bioinformatics.
"I finally understood what PCA is. It is widely used in our laboratory for various purposes. And now I understand the full power of R! Thanks to the teachers of workshops with R Studio! The summer school helped me outline the outline for further training in bioinformatic analysis methods," Anastasia Gorshkova, a graduate student in the field of life sciences at Skoltech, shared her impressions.
For six days, participants listened to lectures from leading scientists on molecular biology, sequencing methods, proteomics, machine learning, and the use of bioinformatics in epigenome research during the development of the organism.
Practical classes were devoted to data processing using Python and R, pipeline construction, search for biomarkers in proteomic data, analysis of RNA-seq, ChIP-seq and mass spectrometry data.
"The atmosphere is amazing. I really like the format of schools, when a lot of interested people gather in one place for 1-2 weeks and talk a lot. The program is very intensive – you come to yourself only in the evening before going to bed, because until that moment you simply don't have time for it. I remember Pavel Yakovlev most of all – since I am a medic myself, I appreciated how detailed and simple he was able to tell the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis," said Sonya Belyaeva, a 4th–year student of the Faculty of Medicine and Biology of SibSMU
The tradition of the school is to invite leading scientists from international research centers to give lectures. This year the lectures were read: Vadim Gladyshev (Harvard Medical School), Tatiana Tatarinova (University of La Verne), Elena Chuklina (ETH Zurich), Sergey Aganezov (Johns Hopkins University), Pavel Sinitsyn (Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry), Konstantin Okonechnikov (German Cancer Research Center), Peter Vlasov (Institute of Science and Technology Austria), Anton Chugunov (IBH RAS), Oleg Shpynov (JetBrains Research), Alexey Sergushichev (ITMO University), Denis Rebrikov (RNIMU, NMIC AGP im.Kulakova) and others.
The intensive program of the school also included a conference and research projects.
The participants worked under the guidance of Yuri Barbitov, Pavel Sinitsyn, Alexey Sergushichev and Konstantin Zaitsev. The projects were devoted to the study of the influence of genetic factors on life expectancy, the analysis of proteomes of C.elegans centenarians, the study of gene expression over time and the study of transcription noise in scRNA-seq data of mice of different ages.
This year, the school was supported by JetBrains, EPAM and BIOCAD. Video recordings of the lectures will be posted on the channel of the Institute of Bioinformatics. The abstracts of the conference and the results of the work on the projects will be published on the Institute's website.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru