About ISMB!

So, this event actually was some months ago, lol. I just forgot how to reference it, really. It feels unreal, if I’m honest with myself. Mostly because I never thought of visiting Canada, and it seems so distant now that I’m back in Santiago. Maybe it is because Canada is the neighbour at the north that we don’t think about much.

Anyways, so how was the conference? Needless to say, I won a prize :D Which is possibly my biggest achievement yet. I still wonder how I did it, because if there’s anything I can say about ISMB, is that it is heavily reliant on algorithms and programs. Seriously, people go there to present their tools and to expose and blabber about their new algorithms. This was actually cool for me, because even though I’m still not sure what exact plan I’m following, I know my objective is to diverge into a more theoretic discussion about my favourite topics. I can’t still put it into words, but if I have something to say, it is that I feel I’m in the correct path.

If anything, probably the project I’m developing now in Chile has a better chance at being present there, because it is a software related project. But I’m just starting, so I guess that’s how it is. Anyways, I won a price for best poster at the EvolCompGen track, which is the devoted track to computational evolution and all the advances on evolutionary studies. If anything, ironically, because of mismatches and not paying attention to the schedule, I actually lost some great conferences along the way. However, I mainly remained at the Microbiome track, which was benefitial for me even though the ecological thing outside humans was presented only at the end of the track.

Stuff that captured my attention and imagination:

1. Structural Annotation: I never heard of the term before, maybe because I’m isolated or something, but this is a form of annotation in which I can use an aminoacidic sequence and, using alphafold and some cool, structural stuff, I can determine the function of certain protein. I believe this is awesome because I have some saved data I can’t possibly get right, because it has a shorter sequence or stuff like that.
2. Text Mining: Text Mining is something I heard before. What is news for me is how you can ue text mining to obtain new data and do some awesome things. For example, you can annotate genes just using text mining approaches. This, obviously, gave me some ideas, even though I know nothing about how to do it. However, I know someone that might now. So I kind of will be exploring this in my spare time, since I absolutely would love to do something with so much information out there.

Anyways, here come the photos: