First day at the BBC in Leuven. My low expectations about the organization were confirmed, but the talks were good and that´s what counts. First was one of the keynote speakers: Charles Lawrence. He works on RNA secondary structure prediction. He warned us about maximizing likelyhoods, free energies etc. because they might not represent the actual population of RNA structures in a sample. Eventhough a MFE is the most optimal structure one must not forget entropy. This was also true for sequence alignments so it is definately something for me to think about. He recommended an article to read: Miyazawa et al. Prot. Eng. 1994.
The next couple of talks were about Micro Array data and (transcription) networks, of which my knowledge is limited. The bottom line of most of these talks were “This is how it is normally done, but our algorithm is better“. This is good I suppose, but the last session of the day was most interesting though.
The last session had many interesting talks, but the third one stood out: Victor Guryev of the Hubrecht lab at Utrecht showed us high CNV´s within lab rat strains, thereby showing high variation within species. He could identify CNV´s by finding regions were the amount of coverage by WGS mapping was two fold or more higher than average. The regions of these CNV´s seem to be conserved in human. Great stuff!!! I´ll keep my eyes open for the publication.
. Leuven is a beautifull little city with lots of old buildings and good food, so I can recommend visiting. Anyway, I have to be off to the conference. I`ll try to make a post tonight about the first day.
My name is John van Dam and I am a Post-Doc at St. Radboud University Medical Center (NL). My research involves bioinformatics and comparative genomics on cilia and signal transduction pathways.