Why Bioinformatics, Biostatistics and
Computational Biology are crucial for Neuroscience?
Neuroscience is an interdisciplinary
science that is strictly engaged with other disciplines ranging from cognitive
science and linguistics to medicine and genetics.
The
ever-growing volume, complexity and potential of neuroscience data is
challenging for the current analytical techniques. It becomes increasingly important to be able to
retrieve information from this these
data into new knowledge. Bioinformatics, Biostatistcs and Computational Biology hand to Neuroscience a new generation of statistical and computational methods, to give
actionable insight to data and foster discoveries involving large-scale data. The Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN), within the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry & Health, is a
multidisciplinary research center focused on neurodegenerative disorders such
as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS also known as motor neurone disease MND),
Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers at the Institute work
closely with patients affected by neurodegenerative diseases and use human
bio-samples in their research. Moreover SITraN has recently acquired an
Illumina HiSeq machine generating RNA-seq data. This highlights the importance
of Bioinformatics, Biostatistcs and Computational Biology at SITraN.
Professor Neil Lawrence and Professor Winston
Hide are world leading scientists in data driven and dynamic modeling for
biotechnological applications. Their researchers’ groups at SITraN represent
the opportunity for a coordinated approach to the development of new computational
methods to find therapies based on rational targets of proven preclinical
effectiveness.
In this light Bioinformatics
Awareness Days (BAD days) are held at SITraN to help scientists in handling and
analyzing high dimensional biological data.
The
Bioinformatics Awareness Days would be days devoted to Bioinformatics. As a
Marie S. Curie postdoctoral fellow @ SITRaN, I am glad to organize such an
event to give my practical contribution in Bioinformatics. The sessions will be
self-contained and should last at most 2 hours.
The
first day focus was on "R&Bioconductor and Multiple hypothesis
testing" and was held on Wednesday, 4 May 2016 at SITraN.
We had massive attendance and good
feedback.
Next events to come!
Luisa Cutillo