Last week, our group as part of the Center for Bioinformatics Saar organized the German Conference on Bioinformatics in Saarbrücken with around 300 participants. We had 4 interesting keynotes by Johannes Söding, Camille Marchet, Nima Aghaeepour and Pavel Pevzner. The lineup was extended by 26 talks from multiple research areas, such as genotypes and phenotypes, single-cell & spatial transcriptomics, drugs and protein structures, AI/ML in biomedicine and others. In addition, 145 posters were presented during two dedicated poster sessions.

On Thursday, Johanna Becher and Jens Zentgraf organized the first PhD-Meeting at a GCB where many students attended and used the time to network with colleagues.

From our group, Jens Zentgraf gave a talk about our new method for singe-cell gene expression quantification Arcane and we had two posters: Inês Alves Ferreira presented her work on gene expression in bacteria using an alignment-free pangenome approach, and Moein Karami presented his work on exact gapped-k-mer-based filtration for genome-scale sequences.