Notes on #ISMBECCB Highlights Session (Sunday Morning)
(I missed the first half of the first talk, so I won't include it. Also, the internet is not good enough for me to get all the links. Sorry)
Of Men and Not Mice: Comparative Genomic Analysis of Human Diseases and Mouse Models by Wenzhong Xiao
Wenzhong Xiao presented an empirical study of correlation between immune response of mice and men. The correlations were very low, which is a warning to be careful in interpreting animal models results. Money quote: "Mice are not human. There are several reasons for that."
An audience member raised the possibility of using humanized models, which was a great point. I'll add that the immune system and immune system dysfunction may be where mice and men differ the most and results there do not invalidate results in other areas of study.
Impact of genetic dynamics and single-cell heterogeneity on development of nonstandard personalized medicine strategies for cancer by Chen-Hsiang Yeang
Simulation study of using different strategies for cancer treatment in the present of resistant mutations. "The current system is often like a greedy algorithm: do X until resistance to X emerges, switch to Y. Repeat. Better strategies are possible."
Very interesting points come out of simple models, but it felt like the start of a conversation rather than an answer.
Interesting presentation detail: author used references to video games as one would use references to literature 100 years ago.
Systems-based metatranscriptomic analysis by Xuejian Xiong.
Study on non-obese diabetic mice with Illumina sequencing. They projected their reads into enzyme space to perform analysis at the metabolic network level.
Interesting technical points: they use alignment in peptide space instead of nucleotide space to get around variability in codon encoding. They also found that Trinity worked best for their data.
Related articles
Gut Bacteria Linked To Immune System Cancer Lymphoma (medicalnewstoday.com)