(This post was initially published on the BiGCaT blog, now discontinued.)
From 21 to 23 november was the Nugo Masterclass in Wageningen, coordenated by Michael Müller and Ingeborg van Leeuwen-Bol. Since I know that our collaboration with NuGO will be very important for my future work, I was very interested in hearing the masters of Nutrigenomics themselves speak at this masterclass. Unfortunately I didn’t have the chance to visit the NuGO week in Italy, so this was clearly an important miss that needed to be corrected.
Most people visiting the masterclass were young nutritional scientists who wanted to learn more about the power of genomics. The class was not targeted at a bioinformaticist like me, and although I learned a lot about current nutrition research through all the poster presentations and talks, the masters didn’t tell me much about genomics that I didn’t already know.
A nice thing about this masterclass was that it took a very practical approach to common problems in nutrigenomics research. All the participants were allowed to present their current research individually and ask the masters and audience direcly about the problems and bottlenecks they are facing. This is a great approach I think, that stimulates critical thinking and problem solving skills as opposed to simple unidirectional information absorption.
The Nutrigenomics Masters
Michael Müller and Duccio Cavalieri both used the metaphor of fishing in their talks but in entirely different contexts. Müller used the fishing metaphor when he talks about microarray data analysis. How do you fish the answer to your favorite question (YFQ) out of the sea of data that you just generated in your experiment? Cavalieri on the other hand suggested that before you do any experiment, go fishing for a week, take a book or two with you and really think through your experiment that you are going to do. What you need to find out is: what is the ideal experiment to do to solve YFQ?. Coming from the background of the yeast model system, Duccio promoted the reductionists approach, where you start with a simple model system and a simple question. He warned against using systems biology and microarrays as a magic black box. No, a computer will not do the research for you (and neither will the bioinformatician)
Cavalieri also talked extensively on the topic of pathway analysis, and demonstrated the Pathway Processor Toolbox, currently being developed at his lab. It will be ready for use soon, although unfortunately only to select NuGO partners. He also mentioned the work of BiGCaT student Thomas Kelder on the Toolbox, and he was clearly impressed, well done Thomas.
Nugo Chips
I soon realized that most of the attendants were probably going to or at least considering to use the Nugo affymetrix chip, the one that I’m currently designing together with Patrick Koks e.a. Although this made me feel a bit like a traveling salesman, meeting the “customers” did teach me a lot and got me extra excited about the chip design.
Ben van Ommen’s visit to the conference was unfortunately very short. He talked about exchange grants and all the other possibilities of cooperation within the NuGO network, which is certainly very useful information. He advertized the NuGO chip some more, and he did it in such a way that I don’t think that getting enough people to use the chip is going to be a problem at all. He mentioned the NuGO website and admitted that it is not very userfriendly. They’re working on it.