There are few meetings as important to the bioinformatics community as Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), which is celebrating its 25th year at the upcoming event in Prague to be held July 21-25. Organized by the International Society for Computational Biology, ISMB is known for its wide range of presentations, from big-picture keynotes to its targeted “birds of a feather” discussions and much more. We love attending this conference as a way to connect with other bioinformatics geeks and hash out (bad pun fully intended) best practices for computational biology.
This year’s ISMB will be held in conjunction with the European Conference on Computational Biology. Organizers announced 14 communities of special interest (COSIs) that will be running themes throughout the event; examples include structural bioinformatics, visualization of biological data, and bioinformatics education.
Another COSI focuses on methods for understanding the impacts of genetic variation. In the VARI-COSI workshop taking place all day July 24, experts will offer a number of presentations and discussions on relevant topics. Our own Anika Joecker, Director of Clinical Partnering Bioinformatics, will give a talk entitled “The importance of using a most comprehensive knowledgebase for the identification of pathogenic variants in cancer and inherited diseases.” She’ll speak about HGMD as well as the QIAGEN Knowledge Base, which contains hundreds of thousands of manually curated pathogenic variants associated with oncology and inherited disease. The session will include real-world examples showing how scientists have used QIAGEN Clinical Insight Interpret and Ingenuity Variant Analysis to improve diagnosis and treatment for patients.
If you’re attending ISMB this year, enjoy!
This year the international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2016) will take place July 8-12 in Orlando, Florida. ISMB is hosted by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and the conference has grown to become the world's largest for bioinformatics and computational biology.
We're looking forward to presenting our solutions, so if you're joining, please stop by our booth #31. You're also welcome to attend our presentations at the Technology Track and the VarI-SIG meeting:
Biological interpretation of ‘omics data: The power of causal analysis
When: Monday, July 11 at 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Speaker: Andreas Kraemer, Ph.D., Principal Computational Biologist, QIAGEN Bioinformatics
Location: America's Seminar
Leveraging network analytics to infer patient syndrome and identify causal mutations in rare disease cases
When: Saturday, July 9 at 12:15 p.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Speaker: Andreas Kraemer, Ph.D., Principal Computational Biologist, QIAGEN Bioinformatics
Location: Swan Hotel, room Mockingbird 2
Identifying genetic variants underlying rare inherited diseases from next generation sequencing data can be both challenging and time consuming. A significant amount of time is invested in variant calling, annotation, and interpretation. Here we present a hereditary disease solution that delivers increased sensitivity for identifying causal variants, while shortening the list of candidates to follow-up. This high performance is achieved with a streamlined end-to-end workflow that includes Biomedical Genomics Workbench, Ingenuity Variant Analysis, and HGMD, while leveraging the large-scale causal network derived from the Ingenuity Knowledge Base, a structured collection of over 11 million findings curated from the biomedical literature and third-party databases. By providing a biological context users can rapidly uncover relevant mutations and gain valuable biological insight. As part of this solution, we have developed a scoring method to rank variants using disease inference from user-provided patient phenotypes to uncover novel or known variants in disease causing genes.
We hope to see you in Florida!
Get more details about ISMB 2016
At ISMB in Dublin it became clear: computational biology is quickly changing from an innovation field to an excellence field. While we are still far from knowing it all, we are certainly moving in the right direction.
A testimony to that is the fact that scientists are focusing more and more on issues as data compression and filtering instead of data collection.
At QIAGEN Bioinformatics we are, however, not intimidated by big data. Our colleague, Alex Kaplun, held Technical Track and introduced TRANSFAC, which is a knowledge-base for transcription factor binding sites, and the way it handles data and identifies the best supported promoters for a gene.
If you are interested in the topic, you can learn more about TRANSFAC, it’s features and capabilities, or get a trial on BIOBASE’s website.
Besides TRANSFAC, we featured two more products focusing on computational biology at ISMB 2015.
The first one was Ingenuity Pathway Analysis, which is a solution helping you to reveal potential causal associations hidden in your datasets of differentially expressed genes.
It has been widely adopted by the life science research community and perfected over the last 12 years. Right now we are proud to announce that a new major feature has been integrated into the software via the IPA 2015 summer release.
Read more about IPA 2015 summer release
The second product we presented was Ingenuity Variant Analysis, a leading application within human sequencing generated with next generation sequencing (NGS). Among many features, we highlighted the user friendliness of the interface, which makes it possible for people with no bioinformatic skills to use the software.
If this caught your interest and you want to learn more, please find product details, trials, access to webinars, training and more here: info, training and downloads
