Omics Research Symposium, August 2022
What started as a get-together online during the pandemic, turned into an international virtual event that brought together academic and industry experts that are working on cutting edge innovation in bioinformatics. This summer (August, 2022), we saw over a thousand participants from US, Europe, Middle East, Africa and India join with top experts presenting. Several major trends emerged as the focus of our event:
- Single Cell Resolution
Since the molecular signals define accurate biological characteristics of whole organisms and tissues, it is no wonder many are interested to take that concept deeper and see how individual cells contribute to these molecular phenotypes and even how do they evolve over time. At the event, we had the opportunity to hear from some of the experts that are working on applying conventional methods of analysis, as well as developing user-friendly tools and novel algorithms to address the challenges in this domain.
One such presentation highlighted a logical workflow for seurat analysis of scRNA-Seq developed at the Tauber Bioinformatics Research Center at University of Haifa, Israel. Dr. Julia Panov, the associate director of the center presented the pipeline with a flexible choice of standard tools and the associated interactive dashboard that users can use to explore the pipeline results.
2. Multi-Omics Integration
One important trend that emerges more frequently these days is the need for effective integration of multi-omics data. This is related to the complexity of molecular features that can be captured via sequencing such as genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and even metabolomic data. If they are produced in a single experiment, together they can describe the full system of a biological condition and describe interactions between the DNA, RNA and Proteins that define a phenotype.
During these talks, we heard about some of the challenges in this field — integration (batch effects) and interpretation (how to “make sense” of the integrated signal.
3. Omics in Unexpected Domains
Space Omics and Forensic Sciences were highlighted this year as domains that have less visibility compared to traditional biomedical research. It was great to see an increasing interest from both students, researchers and industry to tackle some of the challenges there.
Space travel has fascinated many young minds as companies race to colonize Mars or offer commercial space flights, but the actual need for space travel has been on the rise as our technology powering communications and even security requires regular space travel and presence. Reseach done at the Space Station and personnel that live there for extended periods of time do face unique challenges. Researchers asuch as Dr. Joseph Borg from University of Malta are seizing the opportunity to study the impact of microgravity, radiation and other factors by collecting data from biological samples sent to space.
4. Student Project Competition
Finally, the symposium is not only an opportunity to hear experts speak, but also an opportunity to geet feedback on studnet projects that compete for cash prizes and visibility for their work. It was exciting to see that studnets developed projects in biomedical research, space omics and other interesting topics this year. Some of the projects received extensive feedback from our independent panel of judges and went on to secure certificates with cash prizes validating their project competitiveness.
In the past, we also saw seveeral categories of participants, from high school all the way to established faculty from around the world. In order to help develop such projects, our team offers a research fellowship program where international studnets can get mentorship and technical reseources to develop projects, present them for feedback and even publish in research journals. One of the results from such work is greater visibility and differentiation once the studnets apply for research or industry job opportunities. You can see studnet project examples on our portal: https://learn.omicslogic.com/projects
To see all of the talks and presentations, check out our youtube playlist:
For more information about our company and educational work, I welcome you to visit our website:
Elia Brodsky, co-founder and CEO, Pine Biotech | Omics Logic
