On Wednesday 18 June, three members of the centre attended the Cancer Bioinformatics Australia symposium in Sydney, Australia. Post-doctoral research associate Yue Cao presented a poster about epigenomic analysis of CAR-T cells, a promising avenue for cancer treatment. PhD student Cabiria Liang presented a poster about BenchHub, an under-development framework for discovery of curated data sets for methodology benchmarking. Post-doctoral research associate Dario Strbenac presented a poster about the cancer microbiome of head and neck cancer, titled “But Wait, There’s More! Evaluating the Potential of Human Whole Genome Sequencing for Oral Cancer Microbiome Analysis” and winning the Best Early Career Researcher Lightning Talk, engaging the audience with references to 1990s television shopping commercials featuring Tim Shaw of Demtel fame. The key messaging was that, for no extra effort, analogous to a free set of steak knives at no extra cost, researchers could extract important microbiome information from their human-focussed whole-genome sequencing experiment, instead of performing an additional 16S rRNA sequencing experiment, without loss of crucial detail.
