We’d like to thank everyone for another great meeting on May 7th: the speakers, our sponsors (especially our new sponsor, Illumina), the attendees, and all the people working behind the scenes to ensure MonBUG’s success.
We’re working on our next meeting in June. 
We’re hoping to have some very high calibre speakers, so stay tuned.
Don’t hesitate to contact us if you want to volunteer to give a talk at info@monbug.ca.
We’ve left the agenda for the May meeting below, but we’ll be posting the agenda for the June meeting as soon as the speaker lineup is finalized.
Agenda for May 7th meeting (June meeting agenda to be posted shortly)
You can register at http://www.meetup.com/monbug, or just by sending us an email at register@monbug.ca, if you prefer.
The meeting will be held in the main IRCM auditorium.
We’d like to welcome our newest sponsor, Illumina! Just as a reminder, over 90% of all DNA data produced comes from Illumina machines (Regalado, 2014). We have some exciting collaborative projects with Illumina coming up, notably on Illumina BaseSpace.
We have three more great speakers lined up.
David Bujold will be presenting the GenAP portal, which will soon become an essential tool for anyone doing genomic analyses in Canada.
Nadia Tahiri will be presenting her research on the development of new algorithms to build phylogenetic trees.
Nehme Hachem will be presenting his bioinformatics analysis on the impact of chemicals on human health, from a toxicogenomics perspective.
Our presentations and our meetings are deliberately quite short, but you’re welcome to stay after to pursue the discussion.
16:00 – 16:10 Introduction, and open floor for questions, comments or announcements from the participants, Alexis Blanchet-Cohen
16:10 – 17:00 “Improving bioinformatics accessibility with the GenAP Portal”, David Bujold (McGill)
17:00 – 17:15 Snacks and beverages
17:15 – 17:45 “Bioinformatics algorithms for the reconstruction of consensus trees and multiple supertrees”, Nadia Tahiri (UQAM)
17:45 – 18:00 “Assessing the impact of chemicals on human health from a toxicogenomics perspective”, Nehme Hachem (IRCM)
Abstract of the presentation on the GenAP Portal, by David Bujold
“The GenAP bioinformatics software analysis pipelines having been the topic of a previous talk at MonBUG, this presentation will focus on the web services of the project.
The GenAP Portal (Genetics and Genomics Analysis Platform) is an online platform designed for life sciences researchers with the goals of making bioinformatics analyses and data sharing more accessible to non-bioinformaticians, and reducing the bottlenecks associated with genomics data processing. To reach these goals, it provides a web interface with user-friendly analysis tools leveraging Compute Canada resources, such as a Galaxy setup, a UCSC Genome Browser mirror and the IHEC Data Portal.”
Abstract of the presentation on phylogenetic trees by Nadia Tahiri (translated from French)
“We will be presenting new algorithms refining the inference of consensus trees and supertrees obtained by the regrouping of phylogenetic trees (i.e., additive trees or X-trees). The advantage of our approach relative to the classical approaches, which always return a unique tree (i.e. consensus tree or supertree), is that our algorithms propose one or more trees (i.e. consensus tree or supertree) as a solution, depending on the topologies of the trees given in input. We use the k-means algorithm to obtain the optimal partitioning of the set of trees considered. We will apply the proposed algorithms to analyze numerous real and simulated datasets.”