Grace Vinothraj Arulrajah shares his experience of being part of the Bioinformatics for Infectious Diseases Program
Grace Vinothraj Arulrajah is a Student Assistant for Research and Teaching in the Faculty of Bioinformatics and Biotechnology of Hochschule Weihenstephan-Triesdorf (HSWT) (Germany). He is also a Senior Executive R&D at NYSCHEY in Sri Lanka. His areas of focus are on Training programs in Bioinformatics, Multi-Omics Analysis (in-silico) NGS Analysis ( WGS, WES & RNAseq ), Statistics and Big Data Analysis in Bioinformatics ( R, Python ) and also interested in collaborative Research & Development programs in the field of Translational Bioinformatics.
He joined the OmicsLogic Bioinformatics for Infectious Diseases that started on May 4, 2020. The aim of the program was to study viral genomes and understand relationships between viral strains and haplotypes, finding differences in sequence data and seeing the implications for drug and vaccine design and practice analyzing data to gain hands-on experience with Curated Datasets from public domain collections, guided by experts with bioinformatics experience and knowledge about virology.
Grace not only joined the sessions but by working through the coursework and completing assignments during the program, his profile stands out with 54,643 points! As a result, he is #6 on our leaderboard.
The Omicslogic Bioinformatics for Infectious Diseases program had 10 scheduled sessions (2hrs) to learn and understand Viral Diversity and its role in epidemic Infectious Diseases that keep re-emerging, including zoonotic transmission, transmission between humans and the process of viral and bacterial disease development. The sessions were designed to address several critical elements such as Group interactions, hands-on experience and to develop understanding through high quality research publication.
The second phase of the program was designed for participants to gain research experience guided by experts. During this entire program we had several interactive meetings with a group of researchers including Grace to review progress and to collaborate and work on a research problem, as part of the program, Grace worked on an independent study with his fellow participant, S. Priyankan.
The topic of the project – “Human Bronchial Organoids as a 3D ‘In-Vitro test model for SARS- CoV-2. Different versions of the human reference genome in a RNA-Seq analysis (GRCh37 & GRCh38) and their influence on in-vitro studies of a CoViD-19 drug test on human bronchial organoids(hBO).”
You can watch the project presentation here – youtu.be/LWKiIkfzA9Y
Grace shared his feedback on the Bioinformatics for Infectious Diseases program he was part of:
“In my opinion, T-Bio educational Platform also played an important role in our progress like an Aviation Training Device (ATD) for Pilots, where we could get our hands-on and learn from our mistakes and errors. Moreover, we were able to concentrate more on our research part of our Projects than on the coding part, since the Server-Platform took over all of our coding parts, at the same time synchronized courses explained to us the theoretical background of each pipeline.”
“My experience with PineBio is excellent.
Although my academic language is German, I was able to concentrate on the lectures because Elia did an excellent job as our lecturer. The way he directed the course, motivated us to invest more time for it.
The T-Bio server platform saved us a lot of time, and also the best place to practice. I believe t-Bio Server is the best solution, if someone wants to start with NGS analysis. Besides, if we had any problems, Elia and Mohit were always there for our questions.
The motivation for the independent project given by Pine.Bio Team, gave us more room for our creativity and later it helped us to learn a lot from our challenges. The above has not only helped me develop my academic and technical skills, but also helped to develop my discipline in the bioinformatics field. It was my honor to be a part of the program with great minds around the globe.
Thank you for the most productive two months during Lockdown.”
The OmicsLogic programs are designed around the idea of developing Independent Research Projects. The programs enable participants to learn how to analyze large and complex data sets, build processing pipelines, and use data mining techniques and identify the meaningful trends in high throughput data. The projects help them employ the concepts learned during the program to their own ideas and topics and develop independent research projects which are then reviewed by our team of experts.
