Progress in biology is increasingly driven by revolutions within molecular biology measuring cellular material at an unprecedented scale. Consequently, biology is changing into a computational science, analysing and interpreting gigantic volumes of complex data. The Leiden Computational Biology Center (LCBC) focusses on this new approach to biology with the aim to generate new biological insights with clinical applicabilities. It brings together computational biologists that are skilled in the newest technologies in data science and molecular technologies. As molecular technologies are pushing the field towards more precise data (across all tissues and towards single cells), more diverse data (multi-omics), at both spatial and temporal resolution, fundamentally new computational models are required that go way beyond tools that handle the data (bioinformatics), and can model all these aspects integrally. These developments define the strategic research themes on which the LCBC focusses, being models geared towards (1) single cell data, (2) integrative data, and (3) spatio-temporal data. LCBC fosters modeling approaches for promising new molecular data into approaches that push biology boundaries. To realize this aim we work on long-term research projects in close collaboration with biologist and clinicians, and capitalize by proposing medical applications based on insights generated from research done within the LCBC.
LCBC is part of the Leiden University Medical Center.
The possibilities to access the molecular data of cells and tissues are increasing, but this also creates new challenges. How can one find the information needed for research when there is such an enormous amount of data, for example? The scientific program Medical Delta AI for Computational Life Sciences uses AI techniques to unlock biomedical data, discover new candidate drugs,...
The single cell classification benchmark paper by Tamim and Lieke (Abdelaal, Michielsen, et al. Genome biology 2019) was selected for a Highlight Talk at RECOMB (INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN COMPUTATIONAL MOLECULAR BIOLOGY). The conference was set to take place in Padova in April but due to COVID-19, it took place virtually on June 22-25, 2020. Ahmed gave...
Ahmed Mahfouz, together with Prof. dr. Maria Yazdanbakhsh (Dept. of Parasitology) and dr. Mostapha Mbow (Cheikh Anta Diop University, Senegal), has received a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) within their call for ‘Single-cell Analysis of Inflammation’. In the next two years, the team will characterize the impact of urbanization on the immune system of rural and urban Africans....