In the 23rd program of the Young Academics Seminar Series organized by Yunus Emre Institute for 4 years, Hajar Saihi, a doctoral student from Queen Mary University of England, was hosted with a presentation on immunology and bioinformatics.

The Young Academics Seminar Series, hosted by London Yunus Emre Enstitüsü since 2017, continues. In the 23rd program of the series, a conversation was held with Hajar Saihi on immunology, bioinformatics and machine learning, which have become increasingly popular with the Kovid-19 outbreak.

USAGE AREAS OF BIOINFORMATICS

Moderated by Aysegul Chouseinoglu, the speaker, Hajar Saihi, began her talk about what bioinformatics is, its essentials and the new uses of machine learning in labs with a  brief introduction to the immune response and immune cell as Single-cell mass cytometry which is used in the analysis of the behaviour of immune cells after getting infected. Saihi said that this method has been crucial for scientists to identify key biomarkers in disease that can act as potential drug targets.

DATA VOLUME CONSISTING OF THOUSANDS OF CELLS

Describing how he uses bioinformatics, an interdisciplinary field to make sense of data produced in laboratories, Saihi then demonstrated how these highly complex and multidimensional data were presented to the audience by researchers such as the data volume of thousands of cells in a single experiment. She talked about machine learning, new technological developments and their applications, as well as drawing attention to the more traditional data analysis methods and human-induced errors due to the lack of scalability of these analyzes. Having revealed the shortcomings as well as the successes in the field, Saihi concluded his speech by mentioning the great advances in methodology along with the developments in technology.

Hajar Saihi graduated from Queen Mary University Biology Department and completed his master's degree in bioinformatics. He continues his doctorate at the same university.