News

Our paper ‘Virtual meetings promise to eliminate geographical and administrative barriers and increase accessibility, diversity and inclusivity’ was highlighted in the USC Pharmacy news.

Congratulations to Dottie Yu for winning the Summer 2022 Provost Undergraduate Research Fellowship award. She is awarded for continuing work on project titled ‘Rigorous Benchmarking of HLA callers for RNA sequencing data.’ Dottie is an junior undergraduate student in the Quantitative and Computational Biology department at USC and has been working on the HLA project for the past year.

In their comment,’Another recent study affirms that online meetings can promote participant diversity by minimizing barriers to attendance. The authors analyzed the demographics of attendees at scientific conferences before and after the adoption of a virtual format. They observed a significant increase in attendees from underrepresented groups at the virtual events and suggest online platforms may be more inclusive by offering increased accessibility and programming flexibility compared to in-person convenings.’

In their comment, Serghei Mangul and colleagues discuss how genomics and metagenomics methods have become essential public health tools. Once the virus was detected, scientists immediately set about identifying and characterizing the pathogen, enabled by access to reliable and accurate sequencing methods. Similarly, computational tools allowed phylogenetic analyses of the genetic fingerprint of the virus that traced its origin and evolution; by these methods, SARS-CoV-2 was found to have close ancestral ties with bat coronavirus species. Genomic and bioinformatic methods continue to be used across the globe to monitor the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants and track transmission routes.

Dottie Yu is a third year undergraduate in the QCB department and has been working on this project since June 2021. This project evaluates and benchmarks the performance of the 12 existing RNA-seq based HLA callers for their performance in allele typing of the HLA genes, an essential immune-related locus of the human genome. Systematic and comprehensive benchmarking is crucial to helping researchers and clinicians make informed decisions on which HLA caller tool is best for their purposes.

State University of Medicine and Pharmacy (Moldova) Newsroom: Bioinformatics - A new trends in mdeical research

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Tech Xplore reports on Telescope: a tool to manage bioinformatics analyses on mobile devices

UCLA Newsroom: Team proposes plan to use bioinformatics, open data to boost science in developing countries

George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences: Researchers Propose Using Bioinformatics, Open Data to Boost Basic Science Globally

AAAS EurekAlert! Schizophrenics’ blood has more genetic material from microbes

USC School of Pharmacy scientists united researchers worldwide to promote inclusivity in immunology studies