The 17thAsia-Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC) was held in the International Office in HZAU from January 13th to 16th. Hosted by the College of informatics, there were over 200 scholars in the field of bioinformatics from America, Canada, Singapore, Australia, China and other countries attracted to the conference. The conference, which collected 69 reports, 33 posters and 59 papers centering on the topics of current frontiers of bioinformatics and computational biology, was chaired by Professor David Sankoff, a senior bioinformatician and academician of the Royal Canadian Academy of Sciences. And, this time, APBC focused on sequencing and genotyping, gene regulation, transcriptome, epigenetics, comparative and evolutionary genomics, RNA and protein analysis, network biology and systems biology, bioimaging, complex diseases and cancer and some other highlights of bioinformatics.
At the preliminary meeting on 13th January, Professor Li Cheng from Peking University, Professor Rohan Williams from the National University of Singapore and Professor Wang Yong from the Chinese Academy of Sciences respectively delivered three keynote lectures on transcriptome analysis, macrogenome and gene regulatory network. As the three-generation sequencing developed rapidly, single-cell RNA-Seq could better explain the heterogeneity of cells than the traditional RNA-Seq technology. Professor Li Cheng introduced the complete process from sequencing to analysis of single-cell data in detail, including data standardization, clustering, visualization and functional analysis. Professor Rohan Williams started with the history of the macronomic field, focused the limitations of the current technology for isolating environmental bacteria, and systematically introduced the strategy of macronomic analysis from the research methods of 16S ampler sequencing, HiC, single-cell sequencing and so on. And Professor Wang Yong put forward three questions: “what are regulatory elements, what quantitative functions do they have, and what effects that tissue or condition specificity can have”. He explained the mechanism of gene regulation at length with high-throughput gene expression data, ChIP data and open chromatin data.
Qing ping, Vice President of HZAU, delivered the opening speech on the 14th—the very first day of the formal meeting. The first guest speaker was Professor Li Ming from Waterloo University, Canada, whose report was titled “Discoveries of New Antigens”. The core of current immunotherapy is to attack cancer cells by activating the immune system. Therefore, how to seek for personalized antigens to activate the immune system remained an obstacle for scientists. Professor Li Ming elaborated on how to use advanced mass spectrometry technology and in-depth learning method to discover new antigens on the surface of cancer cells in terms of “cancer immunotherapy”. The spectrum obtained by mass spectrometer was the input of neural network, and the output was the corresponding antigen material structure. This approach is inexpensive and efficient and also easy to implement.
A report entitled “Integrated analysis of cancer data and precision medicine” was made by Ron Shamir from Tel Aviv University, Israel. Since the evolvement of sequencing technology, there was a large number of biological data available, of which the analysis has been applied to basic scientific and medical research. Although many new ideas have been proposed for independent studies of each set of data, the integration of these data may yield more comprehensive and systematic findings. Professor Shamir showed the advantages of using integrative analysis in cancer research, as well as their new approach to identifying and sequencing driving genes which had clear advantages in individual tumor research, and provided reference for the advancement of precision medicine.
Professor Sun Fengzhu of University of Southern California, employed a computational tool developed in his lab to identify novel viruses in macromolecular samples to illustrate the relationship between viruses and disease. With the method of studying macro genomics as the entry point, together with approaches such as d2*, deep learning and so on, Professor Sun has developed a series of softwares such as VirFinder, VirFinder-Deep, VirHost-Matcher, VirHost Matcher-Net and MicroPro, which can be applied to discover new viruses and search for their hosts and interaction networks.
Moreover, many scholars at home and abroad have demonstrated their research innovation and results. During the tea break, the audience had a heated discussion, which not only deepened their understanding of their particular research orientations, expanded their scope of thinking, but also learned the development and significance of other directions.
As the serial annual international forum, APBC aims at exploring research, development and new applications in the field of bioinformatics. For its role in international conference, APBC brings together a group of like-minded scholars at home and abroad to share knowledge and experience, offers a platform to exhibit innovations and achievements, and builds a bridge for cooperation and exchange between laboratories domestically and abroad, thus facilitating health care development for all mankind.