HPC and Data Science Workflow in Julia #PGCTalks Date: July 16, 2021, Friday, 4:30-6:00pm This webinar is open to the public and registration is free. Abstract Julia is specifically designed from the start of its conception as a language for high-performance computation but at the same time highly interactive. To achieve this, Julia is one […]

#PGCTalks to feature topics on COVID-19 testing, sequencing, and bioinformatics analysis
#PGCTalks is back! The Philippine Genome Center is hosting mini webinar series #PGCTalks featuring various PGC experts and will cover topics on DNA sequencing, bioinformatics analysis, and testing related to COVID-19.

Genomic Studies for Otitis Media
Previously within an indigenous Filipino community with a ~50% prevalence of otitis media, we identified an A2ML1 mutation that confers a high risk of otitis media susceptibility and influences the relative abundance of specific bacterial taxa within the middle ear.

Cataloging planetary biodiversity
The Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG) is a research organization dedicated to furthering our understanding of the world’s fauna and flora. Through a variety of approaches, researchers at the institute are discovering, cataloging, and describing biodiversity. DNA barcoding, an innovative technique developed at CBG, utilizes DNA sequencing technology for species identification.

Systems Biology to Overcome TRAIL Resistance in Cancer Treatment
Over the last decade, our research team has investigated the dynamic responses and global properties of living cells using systems biology approaches. More specifically, we have developed computational models and statistical techniques to interpret instructive cell signaling and high-throughput transcriptome-wide behaviors of immune, cancer, and embryonic development cells.

SBML (the Systems Biology Markup Language) and related resources for computational systems biology
Computational modeling allows biologists to create formal models of cellular phenomena that can be simulated, analyzed and compared to experimental data. Biologists today have at their disposal a wide range of software tools for their modeling efforts. The wealth of resources is a boon to researchers, but it also presents interoperability problems.

Garuda Platform – Re-imagining connectivity in medicine
With the explosion of data in different dimensions of drug discovery, biomedicine and healthcare, a key challenge is the ability to connect the disparate data sources, discover the right analytics tools for a specific analysis and navigate through inter-operable analytics to provide executable insights.

CRISPR/Cas9 Targeted Genome Editing: Tips and Considerations
The genome found in every cell of our body contains over 20 thousand genes and over 3 billion letters of DNA that sustains life, shapes who we are and determines our risks of having a disease. CRISPR/Cas (clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats) is a recently discovered antiviral defence system in bacteria that has become the favorite set of tools to edit and correct any diseased genome and change any sequence of DNA in precisely chosen genomic location performed not in a test tube but within the nucleus of our living cell.

Comparative genomics of cellulolytic shipworm symbionts
Shipworms are marine bivalves that live and feed on wood. These bivalves, like most xylophagous and herbivorous animals, rely on bacterial symbionts to digest the recalcitrant lignocellulose component of plants. What’s unusual about shipworms is that bacterial symbionts are housed intracellularly in the specialized cells in the gills, therefore are not in direct contact with the ingested food particles.

Implications of hybrid epithelial/mesenchymal phenotype in metastasis: how theory can help understand cancer biology better
Metastasis claims 90% of all cancer-related deaths and remains clinically insuperable. The hallmarks of metastases are processes known as Epithelial to Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) and its reverse Mesenchymal to Epithelial Transition (MET) that enable primary carcinoma cells to migrate and start new tumors at distant organs. I will present an integrated theoretical and experimental approach that elucidates how cancer cells undergo EMT and MET, and how these transitions affect their ability to initiate new tumors.