March update: Congratulations Muzlifah Haniffa, on-demand training

Welcome to the March edition of the Open Targets newsletter! In the past month, the team celebrated the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, as well as International Mother Language Day. This is one of my favourite pieces of work every year (although I'm running out of ideas for videos) — with 15 nationalities in the core team alone, it's a lot of fun to do. Take a look at the supercut (or full length video on YouTube).

Sinking further into the bean bag,

Helena

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Congratulations Muzlifah Haniffa!

Professor Muzlifah Haniffa, Senior Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Open Targets, has won the Ita Askonas Prize, awarded by The European Federation of Immunological Societies.

The award is in recognition of female group leaders with an outstanding track record of achievements in immunology research. Congratulations!

On-demand training: Introduction to the Open Targets Platform

Our latest webinar introducing the Open Targets Platform and the new features we released last year —Associations on the Fly and Target Prioritisation —is now available to view on YouTube.

You can also check out our Quick Tour introduction to the Open Targets informatics tools.

Q&A with Lucy Sibbring, data intern in the Open Targets core team

I find it really satisfying to work with these dataframes with expression count data, (...) and generally taking something that looks quite chaotic and overwhelming at first and boiling it down to a few simple facts of summary statistics. I like that I have the ability to turn a big dataset into something manageable, and to present a clear and concise summary of what's going on.

Lucy Sibbring completed a two-month internship with the Open Targets data team, working on single-cell data in the Tabula Sapiens Consortium Atlas. She chatted to us about her project and her experience at Open Targets.

scSNV-seq: New screening tool to explore mechanisms behind cancer, autoimmunity and neurodegeneration

A recent article on the Wellcome Sanger Institute website explores scSNV-seq, a new method to directly link genotype to whole-transcriptome readout in high-throughput single-cell perturbation screens. The research was led by Andrew Bassett at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Open Targets.

Job Board

Interested in joining Open Targets? We are currently recruiting:

• Bioinformatician (22 March) — We are looking for a bioinformatician to join the Open Targets data team. We are seeking an enthusiastic team member to expand our informatics platforms through the integration and analysis of a wide array of biological data to enhance drug discovery.In this role you will actively develop pipelines that analyse, interpret and integrate our growing experimental research data with public domain data. We are looking for someone with experience in data integration and benchmarking, developing production-ready pipelines and enthusiasm to work with interesting biological datasets.

Keep an eye on our jobs page for all our opportunities.

I'd love to know what you think of this newsletter — let me know at [email protected]!

— Helena, Open Targets Communications Lead