Presenting the winners of the first Bioinformatics Peer Prize.
For a long time the Thinkable Academy team has wanted to create a suite of global competitions that showcase all the latest research from each scientific field. To drive engagement and collaboration we then invite other researchers to learn from, and vote on that research in a massive, open peer-review. At the beginning of May, our very first such competition — the Bioinformatics Peer Prize — came to an end. We were excited by the turnout and overall reception.
The competition invited researchers in the broad field of Bioinformatics to submit their research papers from January-March 2017. These papers could be either peer-reviewed articles, or preprint articles from repositories like bioRxiv.
Over a month-long submission period we received 102 submissions, with teams comprising researchers and students from 137 international universities. An additional 582 verified researchers from around the world then voted on the most innovative and impactful research.
The winners.
Biowheel (https://biowheel.dibsvis.com/) is a web-based award-winning data visualization tool, for exploring high-dimensional and heterogeneous biomedical data. Through interactive sorting and filtering of data, Biowheel enables researchers to quickly detect data outliers, evaluate data consistency, and discover mixed trends. Its interactive data presentation, visually-engaging design, and friendly user interface opens the door to easier, faster and better high-dimensional data interpretation for biomedical professionals with and without programming training.
From: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/11/099739
The QLab team from Rice University in Houston, TX took out the Main Prize category with 123 votes from researchers as far afield as Zhejiang, China.
The Main Prize was very tightly contested with with two clear leaders vying for the top position throughout the competition. In second place with 117 votes, The Genetic Miners are a duo from the Walter + Eliza Hall Institute of Medical research in Melbourne. The duo consists of Roberto Bonelli and Anna Quaglieri. Check out the other the top 5 entries here:
A Genetic Treasure Map — 117 Votes
CIDR: Ultrafast and accurate clustering through imputation for single-cell RNA-seq data — 58 Votes
Clinical grade genomic rearrangement detection using GRIDSS — 42 Votes
Falco: a quick and flexible single-cell RNA-seq processing framework on the cloud — 37 Votes
The main objective of RNA-seq experiments is to find genes that are differentially expressed (DE) between two or more biological conditions. However, most commonly used methods for RNA-seq DE analysis do not utilize prior knowledge of biological networks to detect DE genes. Incorporating prior information to the DE analysis can extend our understanding of gene functions, biological pathways and system-level properties of the organism. Using both simulated and real data sets, we propose a method which utilizes the prior knowledge of biological interaction networks offering biologists with a viable, more powerful alternative when detecting DE genes from RNA-seq data.
From: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btw833
Malathi Dona from La Trobe University in Melbourne, was not only successful in winning the Student Prize with 86 votes; she also had the third highest vote count in the Main Prize. Another notable mention from the Student Prize was Sankha Subhra Das, from the Indian Institute of Technology who received 65 votes.
miRnalyze: An interactive database linking tool to unlock intuitive microRNA regulation of cell signaling pathways — 65 Votes
An open invitation to all Bioinformatics researchers
The Thinkable Academy would like to thank everyone for the outstanding quality of submissions and fantastic involvement from the Bioinformatics community.
With the success of the first-quarter Peer Prize we are happy to announce that submissions for the second-quarter competition will be opening on the first of July, 2017. Submissions can be any piece of Bioinformatics research published in a peer-reviewed journal or submitted to pre-print repositories, such as BioRxiv, during April-June 2017.
We look forward to learning from more brilliant researchers and helping to mobilise greater engagement and collaboration for the field of Bioinformatics.
