1st Virtual Symposium on Bioinformatics

By Atiya Mahmood and Samerene Saddique.

BIOINFORMATICS IS the application of computer science and information technology to the field of biology and medicine. Bioinformatics deals with algorithms, databases and information systems, web technologies, artificial intelligence and soft computing, information and computation theory, software engineering, data mining, image processing, modeling and simulation, signal processing, discrete mathematics, control and system theory, circuit theory, and statistics, for generating new knowledge of biology and medicine, and improving & discovering new models of computation.

Bioinformatics is a growing field in Pakistan, although significant improvements have been made in the recent years; however there is still need to develop skills of existing student/ researchers and increase awareness among potential new students. One step in this direction was a recent virtual symposium on Bioinformatics in October this year. It was first such seminar arranged by ISCB-RSG Pakistan in collaboration with National Academy of Young Scientists (NAYS) and weekly Technology Times; the only newspaper on science and technology. The symposium was attended by more than 30 students from 29 different institutions of Pakistan. Six speakers from foreign and local universities spoke on topics related to bioinformatics.

At the symposium, first speaker was Prof. Dr. Shahid Nadeem Chohan. He is a member of ISCB and faculty advisor for Pakistan ISCB-RSG. He is also founder of the Pakistan EMBnet National Node at Comsats Institute of Information Technology (CIIT). Dr. Chohan spoke about the career opportunities of Bioinformatics in Pakistan and how researchers can participate in the development of bioinformatics in the region. He talked both at individual and institutional level and emphasized on need of entrepreneurship in the field.

Next speaker was Muhammad Ilyas, a PhD research scholar at the Centre for Excellence in Molecular Biology (CEMB), University of the Punjab, Lahore, and has worked as visiting research student at the Korean Bioinformation Center (KOBIC), South Korea, Ilyas is the founder president of the International Society for Computational Biology Regional Students Group of Pakistan (ISCB-RSG-Pakistan). Talking on the “Current status of Bioinformatics in Pakistan”, he briefed comprehensively and gave a complete picture of bioinformatics, in terms of degree awarding institutes, research groups, carrier opportunities, job positions, market situation and establishment of bioinformatics societies like ISCB-RSG, to provide a platform of learning and to combine the efforts of Bioinformaticians.

Third speaker was Ali Faisal; who has done his MS in Machine Learning and Bioinformatics from Edinburgh University (UK), currently he is working as a researcher at the Adaptive Informatics Research Center at Aalto University. Ali Faisal holds a position at Finnish doctoral program in Computational sciences. His lecture was bit technical and explained the Pattern Recognition and Retrieval in Microarray experiments. Faisal elaborated the experiment from the bulk of data based upon topic driven model of data mining. Afterwards he described a complete retrieval framework. Overall the lecture was a good introduction to machine learning and data mining.

The presentation of Faisal Khan on the topic of “Protein-Protein Interaction Networks” was greatly admired by the audience. Faisal Khan is a D.Phil. student at the University of Oxford. He is a member of the Oxford Protein Informatics Group led by Dr. Charlotte Deane, and work at the interface of cell and systems biology studying new mitotic proteins in Drosophila. His presentation thoroughly explained the importance of Protein-Protein interactions (PPI), why we work on them and finally advantages and robustness of research on PPIs.

Atiya Mahmood is currently working as teaching/research associate at Department of Bioinformatics of International Islamic University Islamabad. Her presentation was about MicroRNAs and how their targets can be predicted using different bioinformatics tools. In her presentation she also described the principles of predicting miRNA targets from both bioinformatist and bioinformatician perspective.

The last speaker of the symposium was Samerene Saddique, who has done Masters in Pharmaceutical sciences from London Metropolitan University, London, UK. She has worked as visiting research student at cancer research UK, and has also worked as research officer in CEMB. Samerene shared her knowledge on drug design, discovery and development process. She briefed about drug targets, steps involved in the drug designing processes and contribution of bioinformatics in this process and finally the clinical trials.

The seminar was concluded on a discussion session, in which students queries and ambiguities regarding the presentation topics and the bioinformatics in general were addressed. This symposium was a knowledge sharing exercise from which all the participants and the speakers benefited equally and decided to arrange such events on larger scale in future for the benefit of students, professionals and profession in general.