Thea Nikolaou/ Dr. Solomon - Week 5

This week I spent most of my time working on my project. I attended several meetings with the bioinformatics team for the molecular genetics laboratory to learn more about the way they support the lab's data analysis. They have lots of ongoing projects that facilitate analysis of the data output from genetic testing. Most of their work is focused on maintenance and improvement of programs that the team previously developed. Troubleshooting and collaboration seem to be significant parts of their work. In terms of the project that I am working on with their help, I have been able to filter out some of the noise from the TSO 500 data that results from germ line mutations as well as get a better understanding of the existing R script that was developed to analyze mutational signatures from Exact1 data. I started looking into different signature analysis R packages and trying to find one that may be better suited to gene panel data input rather than whole exome or genome sequencing. 

I have also been in communication with Dr. Velu about the image analysis project; this project is going a bit slower as I don't have support from a team but it's been a great learning experience. The deep learning algorithm for the determination of tumor content and the number of slides that should be scraped to result in a successful NGS assay is capable of performing most of what Dr. Velu had in mind and its implementation is coming along. 


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