Computational Biology Seminar Series
The next Computational Biology Seminar will be scheduled for Spring/Summer 2020
Previous Seminars
Wednesday, September 4, 2019
Speaker: Dr. Andrew Severin, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Iowa State University
Transforming big data into informative data to accelerate scientific discovery
The role of bioinformatics has become increasingly important in the analysis of highthroughput
sequencing data used to answer scientific questions today. I will discuss how
collaboration with your local bioinformatics facility can accelerate scientific discovery,
increase extramural grant success and decrease time to publication. Having a centralized hub
of bioinformatics knowledge and expertise is as important today as having a shared supercomputing
infrastructure.
Thursday, December 12, 2019
Speaker: Dr. Chris Vollmers, Assistant Professor, University of California - Santa Cruz
Realizing the potential of full-length transcriptome sequencing
Summary: Over the last decade, the analysis of transcriptomes using RNA-seq has become an integral part of biomedical research. However, because RNA-seq requires the fragmentation of transcripts, a lot of information on the analyzed transcriptome is lost in the process. Sequencing full-length transcripts using long-read sequencers like the ONT MinION could overcome this limitation but faces its own set of challenges. Dr. Vollmers will talk about how his lab has started to address these challenges using both molecular and computational biology. Finally, Dr. Vollmers will present full-length transcriptome data of human immune cells on the bulk and single-cell level to show the types of information we can now extract from this type of data.