Give them omics data, and they will show you its value

Like the other teams at BioLizard, there is a range of skills within the Bioinformatics team. “We are a very complementary team, with some people having for example more proteomics experience, while others have extensive knowledge of single-cell sequencing analyses,” says Alexander Koch, the team lead.?

As team lead, Alexander Koch says, “It is my ambition to grow as a team lead, to help the people in my team become better scientists, and to create and maintain a healthy and motivating work environment.” To promote such an environment, whenever it is time to tackle a new project, the team always aims to find a balance between the required skills and the individual team members’ interests. Nonetheless, Alexander says, “We all enjoy learning new technologies, and the variety of projects we get to work on gives us the perfect opportunity to master new skills.”

Regardless of the project, the core activities of the Bioinformatics team are focused on the processing and analysis of sequencing-related data. This field of expertise has a lot of variety and diversity - the data that our Bioinformatics team is working on might be derived from bulk or single cell data sets, and include anything from genome sequencing to transcriptomics to bisulfite sequencing. The team is also familiar and comfortable with working with other types of omics data, like proteomics datasets. Indeed, when asked about the typical projects that the bioinformatics team works on, they will list off a wide range of activities, like “examining differential protein expression plus post-translational modifications”, “cell type deconvolution”, and “transcriptomics, proteomics, and whole genome sequencing for biomarker discovery”. Give them omics data, and they will show you its value.

“While most of our work is centered on processing and analysing omics data to come to biological insights,” Alexander says, “We do often collaborate with the Data analytics & AI and Software & IT Architecture teams. A typical example would be a project in which we perform a differential expression analysis on an RNA-sequencing data set, but the client would also like to build a predictive model on the same data and perhaps an interactive dashboard to further explore the data and results.” By collaborating, the different BioLizard teams can build a bespoke solution for the unique needs of each client, which incorporates the capabilities of all of our Lizards.?

Alexander is also a frequent collaborator with our Data Management team. In fact, he recently co-presented a webinar on the topic of Data Management, together with our team lead for Data Management, Yves Muyssen, and in collaboration with flanders.bio. You can watch it here!?

Would you want to collaborate with us, too, to gain access to new, data-driven insights that can give your life sciences company a competitive edge? Reach out today!