ISBI Daily - Saturday

Samar explains: “ It is about relating the human brain connectome, which is the connection between brain regions, with genetic information. I’m using gene expression information here. We are trying to analyse together heterogeneous datasets, incorporating the gene expression data. It’s not easy, because genes interact with each other, and the human brain is a huge amount of data that also associates with each other .” Samar says that it can be a challenge to get a sample size that is large enough. Data is available, but not enough, and there are not enough models that work with this kind of data. The second part of the project will be looking to develop a method to overcome this. Samar tells us that what makes her most proud in doing this work is working together with people from different backgrounds on the same problem. She is by training a statistician; her main supervisor Nicola Mulder is the head of the Computational Biology Group, so she is a bioinformatician; her course supervisor, Alessandro Crimi , is a neuroscientist; and her other course supervisor is a mathematician. 16 Saturday ISBI DAILY Poster Presentation: Relating Connectivity Changes in Brain Networks to Genetic Information in Alzheimer Patients Samar Elsheikh Samar S. M. Elsheikh is a PhD student from the Computational Biology Group at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She speaks to us about her poster, which is about trying to integrate and incorporate imaging information from the human brain with genetic information. “ We are trying to analyse together heterogeneous datasets, incorporating the gene expression data. ”