n=32 Classroom crowdscience competition

N Equals One

Trey Ideker and Samson Fong teach a course at UC San Diego School of Medicine called Biological Networks and Biomedicine. It’s designed to introduce graduate students to the concept of network biology — living systems as an interconnected whole, instead of individual cells, proteins or genes — and the bioinformatics tools used to study these systems. But instead of giving the class a standard final exam, Ideker and Fong created a competition. The students worked in teams to analyze a database of patient genetic information and identify the genes most closely associated with schizophrenia. The top teams not only came up with a list of known schizophrenia-associated genes, they ran the analysis in under five minutes and outperformed previously published approaches. Learn more: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190424112921.htm