Guest Presentation: SNPs and Heritable Disease Associations

Come join us for a presentation by three of our members who have been working on some really cool stuff over the last year! Peter Heaton, David Kelly, and Mark Maslyn will talk to us about their work finding associations between certain SNPs and hertiable diseases (and how they taught themselves bioinformatics to do it!) More on their talk below:

"Free Association" Biolab style... If a crocodile with Crohn’s chromosomes meets a Myopic monkey with 76% similar SNPs, what can you predict about the nature of any offspring or the crocodile's feeding habits? Seriously, if GWAS (Genome Wide Association Studies) identifies you have 12 SNPs (mutations) associated with osteoarthritis does that dictate that you will have osteoarthritis at some point? How well do the 12 SNPs predict the disease? We’ll introduce you to the tools and techniques we developed to investigate SNPs and associations for 35 disorders (including Crohn's disease, myopia, osteoarthritis) and 145 genomes (not including yours, yet). Our talk will provide you with insights from a 1-year, bio-rookie roller coaster exploration of heritable disease associations. Among the three of us, topics to be discussed include:

How We Got Started : David Kelly
Data Mining GWAS: David Kelly
Cloud Architecture: Mark Maslyn
Database Design: Mark Maslyn
Data Visualization: Peter Heaton
Cloud collaboration: Peter Heaton
Future directions: Peter Heaton