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