User perspective: Computational Biology Group Team Representatives

What does your professional life at Evotec look like? The fast development of omics technologies (e.g., next generation sequencing) in recent years has been the starting point for truly data-driven drug discovery. We are working in a dedicated Computational Biology team of around 20 specially trained biologists with in-depth experience in analysing omics data and ensure efficient application of high-throughput omics technologies by analysis and biological interpretation of those resulting large and complex datasets.

… for computational biologists

Computational Biology Group Team representatives Maren Feist, Vijaja Kari and Elisa Buchberger

To integrate and analyze omics data, we can rely on PanHunter^TM allowing us to work with different datatypes in an efficient, interactive, and reproducible manner. The strength of PanHunter is that it allows us to use one streamlined analysis workflow for most datasets, without adaptations and the need of developing new analysis scripts. The interactive user interface makes sample selection fast and intuitive. Results can easily be saved and shared via snapshot links – a strong advantage especially when multiple people working on the same project and ensuring reproducibility of the results.

A typical data analysis workflow starts with a quality check to spot technical biases or outliers that would interfere with biological interpretation. Subsequent dimension reduction gives a first idea of sample clustering and structure as well as provides the starting point for downstream analyses. Typically, we investigate differential gene expression, pathway, and gene ontology enrichment, network analysis, interpretation of patient data, and signature matching. An important role of a Computational Biologist is to present insights to projects and clients. With PanHunter we can produce high quality, interactive visualizations that are easy to share, understand, and can be integrated into our analysis reports. These visualizations include many different formats ranging from dimension reduction plots, heatmaps, networks and pathway visualizations, and each has multiple options to customize. Together with our colleagues, we are constantly working on the implementation of new tools and the improvement of existing apps, ensuring state-of-the-art analysis of datasets. Thereby, PanHunter is organically growing with every new project, addresses real life questions, and incorporates the expertise of many, highly skilled scientists.