Introduction
The MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS) held its thirteenth annual conference themed “Precision Medicine and Data Sciences” at the University of Memphis, FedEx Institute of Technology in Memphis, Tennessee on March 3–5, 2016. There were 156 conference registrants and 117 abstracts submitted, including 63 oral and 54 poster presentations.
The conference was co-chaired by Drs. Ramin Homayouni and Shraddha Thakkar. Conference committee members were Cesar M. Compadre (President), Weida Tong (Speaker Coordinator), Darin E. Jones (Treasurer), Bindu Nanduri (Oral talk judge), Mary Yang (Poster judge), Ujwani Nukala (Student Activity Coordinator). For 2017–8, Dr. Bindu Nanduri was chosen as President-Elect and Dr. Shraddha Thakkar as President.
Keynote speakers were: Mary V. Relling, “Clinical Implementation of Pharmacogenetics in Precision Medicine”; Carl E. Cerniglia, “Human Microbiome: Sequencing-Based High-Throughput Omics Technology and Bioinformatics Used in The Assessment of The Safety of Antimicrobial Drug Residues in Food”; Christopher E. Mason, “Genome, Epigenome, Transcriptome, and Epitranscriptome Landscapes: from single cells, to entire cities, to space”; and William Slikker, Jr., “Regulatory Implications of Genomics and Bioinformatics for Food and Drug Safety”.
There were three workshops: Workshop 1: “Using Cyberinfrastructure to Scale your Science” provided by Jason Williams, Ph.D., describing the computational tools and services developed by CyVerse (formerly iPlant Collaborative) to upload, share, and analyze large biological datasets for a variety of applications from genomics to phenotypic analysis. Workshop 2: “Gene Network & Systems Genetics” by Robert Williams, Ph.D., to provide hands on experience with GeneNetwork (www.genenetwork.org). GeneNetwork is one of several web resources that combine public genomic and genetic data along with open-source code for genome-to-phenome analysis. Participants were introduced to human, mouse, rat, and plant genomic datasets and code that can be used in a wide range of bioinformatic, medical, and agronomic settings. Workshop 3: “Next Generation Sequencing Analysis” was provided by Rakesh Kaundal, Ph.D., focused on the analysis of RNA-Seq data for differential gene expression and related statistical tests using R/Bioconductor.
There were 12 breakout sessions. Each session had one featured speaker and four oral presenters presenting their research. Topics were:
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1.
miRNA and Toxicogenomics
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2.
Targeted Therapies, Systems Biology and the Future of Safety Assessment
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3.
Protein Structure/Function and Biological Networks
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4.
Microbiome: Disease and Drug Resistance
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5.
Predictive toxicology and Chemo-informatics
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6.
Next Gen Sequencing
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7.
Machine Learning in Large Data
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8.
Proteomics & Host-pathogen interaction
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9.
Bioinformatics Methodologies
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10.
Oncology and Precision Medicine
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11.
Drug Discovery and Development
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12.
Genomics
The Drug Discovery and Development Colloquium was organized by the student leaders of MCBIOS and was held at the University of Alabama at Birmingham from June 28–30, 2016. The colloquium was organized to showcase the synergistic interaction between chemistry, biology, pharmacology, and bioinformatics in the process of drug development and to promote a professional dialogue between students and experts from different disciplines interested in the processes of drug discovery and development.
Best Paper Award, MCBIOS 2016: “VDJML: A file format with tools for capturing the results of inferring immune receptor rearrangements” by Inimary Toby (1st author), Lindsey Cowell (senior author) and 21 co-authors [1].
Best Oral Presentations (Post-Doctoral fellows):
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Pankaj Pandey, University of Mississippi
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Aswathy N. Rai, Mississippi State University
Best Oral Presentations (Students):
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First Place: Renzhi Cao, University of Missouri
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Second Place: Chathurani Ranathunge, Mississippi State University
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Third Place: Haiou Li, University of Missouri
Best Poster (Computational Biology):
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First Place: Rachel Steele, Troy University
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Second Place: Doga Demirel, University of Central Arkansas
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Third Place: Caleb Benson, Mississippi State University, and Vivek Chandramohan, SIT India
Best Poster (Bioinformatics):
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First Place: Dan Li, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
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Second Place: Tanzim Hassan, Mississippi State University
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Third Place: Tina Gui, University of Mississippi