RSG-Italy, YoungBITS and the CINI Young-InfoLife groups have partnered to organise a PhD symposium during the BITS Annual Meeting. The goal of the symposium is to provide a supporting and stimulating forum for undergraduate, master, PhD students and early stage researchers to present their research and to connect with the wider Italian Bioinformatics Community. The symposium is open to all interested attendees of BITS Annual Meeting and we strongly encourage the participation of experienced researchers who can provide precious feedback and support to presenting students. The symposium will also feature invited talks from established scientists and a roundtable discussion about career prospects in Bioinformatics.

Chairs:

• Symposium: Arianna Consiglio & Bruno Fosso
• Students’ talks: Giacomo Baruzzo
• Round table: Arianna Consiglio, Bruno Fosso & Claudia Mengoni

Symposium Programme

June 23rd

Session 1 (15:00-16:00) Students’ talks
Undergraduate, master and PhD students will have the opportunity to present their research project (which can be work in progress) as 10-minutes talks.

• Presentation of YOUNG BITS, RSG-Italy, CINI Young-InfoLife groups - Claudia Mengoni, Simone Pernice
• A bioinformatics analysis to study circRNA‑associated ceRNA network in human breast invasive carcinoma - Alessio Funari
• Challenges and advances in constraint-based modelling of single-cell metabolism - Bruno G. Galuzzi
• Development of a gut microbiome eubiosis/dysbiosis index based on DNA metabarcoding data by using Machine Learning approach - Erika Lorusso
• A simultaneous multi-omics data integration approach unveiled novel regulatory mechanisms underlying Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease - Pasquale Sibilio

Session 2 (16:00-17:00) Round Table discussion on “Career prospects for a bioinformatician”

• Francesca Cordero - BITS Secretary and Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science in the University of Turin
• Ernesto Picardi - Professor at the Department of Biosciences, Biotechnologies and Biopharmaceutics in the University of Bari Aldo Moro
• Vincenzo Costantino - Product specialist manager at Masmec S.p.A. - Biomed division

June 22nd and 23rd

Poster session (included in Poster Session 2 of main BITS Conference)

• Transcriptomic analysis of natural killer (iNKT) and T lymphocytes CAR-T cells obtained by different interleukin treatments - Elena Abbatangelo
• Transcriptional analysis of the synergism between simvastatin and valproic acid with chemotherapy in metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma - Laura Fiorenza
• Prediction of the gut microbiome health through a machine-learning based integrative omics data analysis - Bablu Kumar
• Extension of the statistical and computational framework COTAN to compute a new similarity index per cell pair in scRNA-Seq data - Daniel Puttini

Scientific committee

• Vincenzo Bonnici
• Arianna Consiglio
• Giuseppe Defazio
• Bruno Fosso
• Claudia Mengoni
• Simone Pernice
• Mirko Treccani