Saturday, 3rd September, 2016, 13:30 - 17:00 (half day tutorial)

Tutorial at ECCB 2016 - DisGeNET: a discovery platform to support translational research on human diseases

Recent technological breakthroughs have produced an unprecedented increase in the amount of data on the genetic determinants of diseases. To unveil the molecular mechanisms that underlie diseases and to support drug discovery projects, it is necessary to place these data in the context of the current biomedical knowledge. Despite the large volume of information available, its analysis and interpretation are hindered because it is annotated using different criteria and vocabularies and fragmented across different resources. Furthermore, a large fraction of data on diseases is only available as free text in biomedical publications. To overcome these difficulties we have developed DisGeNET (Piñero et al, 2015), a discovery platform that contains information on human diseases and their genes.

In this tutorial we will provide an overview of the main features of DisGeNET, and then introduce the suite of tools that the platform offers to support translational research.  The tutorial includes a hands-on session organized around case studies that will illustrate how to use these tools.

Materials will be made available via the DisGeNET website.

Target audience: the tutorial is aimed at a variety of audiences: bioinformaticians, systems biology users, biologists, and healthcare practitioners.

Speaker: Laura I. Furlong and Janet Piñero - IBI group of GRIB (IMIM-UPF)

Room 15th European Conference on Computational Biology - The Hague, Netherlands - World Forum Convention Center