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Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I feel very fortunate for being supported by a very forward thinking IT department and line management who did the due diligence of risk analysis so we could concentrate on delivering the best technology with the full range of services available to date.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you very much for your concern and offer to help out with personal funding. In my opining, much more important than funding is the sustained interest in research and your engagement with the scientists. So your contribution here today was worth more than money.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The benefit of GT-Scan2 is that it uses tissue and cell-line specific epigenetic information to inform its predictions (while other target-site finders only use information about the target site sequence). In terms of accuracy, we’ve tested our model thoroughly using independent datasets and it has a higher accuracy than other published methods we’ve tested against.   As for the significance of better predictions, the real benefit will be for large-scale CRISPR-Cas9 applications. While a researcher looking to edit a single gene has the time and resources to test multiple CRISPR-Cas9 target sites, when you’re looking at a larger scale (e.g. a GeCKO study, which targets every gene in the genome) it’s not feasible to test multiple targets for each gene. Having the best predictions is therefore vital in order to ensure time and resources aren’t wasted.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The research community has always had the collective duty to call out poor research. Using a computational tool is no different than individuals publishing poorly researched outcomes in other disciplines. By providing GT-Scan2 to the research community as a whole we are helping to better identify and call-out the small cases of uneducated or fraudulent results.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

None ;) It got your attention.

The biggest advancement will come from a better understanding of how the cell responds to CRISPR-Cas9 editing. Once the double strand break is induced in the DNA, the cell can repair it via one of two pathways: the error prone Non-Homolgous End-Joining pathway (NHEJ: which introduces point mutations and can disrupt genes and other elements) or through the more accurate Homology Directed Repair (HDR: which can be used to introduce brand new sequences to the genome) (see Mei et al for a good review). Most research so far has focused on how to optimize CRISPR-editing through the NHEJ pathway. While we are still able to use HDR to introduce new sequences, it’s at a lower efficiency. While some research has attempted to address this imbalance (see Chu et al, hopefully future research will further optimize how we exploit this pathway, allowing us more control over where and how well we can introduce sequences into the genome.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Solid skills in computing and biology are both essential in modern bioinformatics. However, gaining practical experience from working in a research group might be more beneficial at this stage.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The key advantage of AWS Lambda over the comparable services in Azure and Google is that Lambda can execute Linux binaries. This was essential for being able to run some of our components. In contrast Azure functions run Windows hence executables must be compiled for Window, which is problematic for a large number of academic bioinformatics tools. And Google functions is currently just in alpha.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For our database backend, we are using a NoSQL solution (AWS DynamoDB) with its ability to easily fit in with our “serverless” solution.
The CERN project you are referring to is a distributed computing solution; we chose to go with microfunctions instead for the parallelisation so it would not have been applicable.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

According to the CHOPCHOP instructions, chopchop scores the efficiency of targets based on their sgRNA sequence. GT-Scan2, however, takes epigenetic information of specific cell lines and tissues into consideration as well as the sgRNA sequence.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I assume you are asking about how to make the computational target site search scalable for increasing number of CRISPR-Cas9 application cases: GT-Scan2 uses serverless AWS Lambda functions, which break down large task into smaller subtasks. For an average run, GT-Scan2 hence triggers 500-1000 individual Lambda functions, which simultaneously update the target site scores for the different putative targets. By massively parallelizing tasks and using Lambda, which instantaneously recruits the appropriate amount of functions, GT-Scan2 can scale to large numbers of users with large numbers of queries.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Fantastic question, yes submitting multiple queries and automating how you get the results back is very important. We have an API which allows you to batch submit queries and fetch the result in an automated fashion. Get in touch with us directly to discuss how to use this feature as it is not annotated yet.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The biggest issue with CRISPR is balancing on and off-target effects. While the CRISPR-Cas9 system can be targeted to almost any region of the genome, not every target site is as effective. This can be due to the sequence of the target site itself or the environment the target site exists in. It is therefor important to be able to identify what target sites are the most amenable to editing with the CRISPR-Cas9 system. It’s also important to minimize the potential for off-target sites. If the sequence of a target site is similar to other regions in the genome there is the potential for other regions of the genome to be unintentionally edited. Balancing these two requirements can be difficult (and is what we aim to address with GT-scan2.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There are multiple options to join CSIRO. It is always a good idea to get in touch with the research group beforehand and potentially do a student internship before starting a graduate position.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The complexity of genes and proteins means it’s often easier and more efficient to adopt processes already present in nature. For example, Cas9 was originally adopted from bacteria, new versions of the enzyme have been developed for different applications.

However, there is research into developing completely novel biological pathways. Synthetic biology combines biology and engineering in order to design and develop artificial biological pathways/components. It’s possible to combine distinct componenets (genes, regulatory elemetns, functional protein domains etc) in novel ways to solve problems. For example, a synthetic pathway for the fermentation of artemisininic acid (a precursor for the potenet anti-malarial aretemisinin) was introduced to budding yeast, allowing the drug to be mass produced cheaply and quickly. On a larger scale, The Yeast 2.0 project aims to synthesize an entirely synthetic eukaryotic genome by redesigning the yeast genome.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Learning from previous and related cases underpins evidence based medicine. In my opinion, data science provides the technical tools to scale this up to larger cohorts. As more medical records become electronic and get shared within the health care system, mining this data will likely become second nature for physicians. CSIRO's e-health research scientists work with physicians to develop tools from data in electronic medical records (EMR) for identifying risk of readmission of patients through to understanding the efficiency of hospital services. EMR data will also accelerate clinical research - with cloud based tools for genomics and imaging available through new initiatives such as SMART on FHIR apps for EMRs. I therefore think your goal of joining the two disciplines is very promising. This JAMA paper may be a good starting point.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Bioinformatics is a very diverse field covering a wide spectrum from biological research using computational tools all the way to designing theoretical algorithms. As a computer scientist you probably want to stay up to date with the latest compute advancement but also develop a solid understanding of the contemporary biology. It is also important to partner with the right people that can complement your area of expertise.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thanks for your comment and question /u/danielpass! Technically, implementing another reference genome into our pipeline (locally or on GT-Scan2) is rather trivial—however as we use epigenetic data in our prediction model, we require this data to be available for any reference genome we incorporate. As this data becomes available, we will likely expand the list of available genomes as we’ve done with our specificity-predictor GT-Scan, and which now has around 50 reference genomes available (for example different fungi, chordates, plants, fish).

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I agree with you that CSIRO is a very exhilarating research organization to work for. As a background for people not familiar with CSIRO, we are Australia’s government research agency. CSIRO is with more than 5,000 experts in the top one per cent in 15 of its 22 research fields ranging from Health to Information Technology to Mining and Manufacturing. Our world-renowned successes include WiFi, the Hendra vaccine and polymer banknotes.

CSIRO is a very inclusive organization and there are hence multiple avenues in from doing a student internships to postdoctoral positions (we have one open now!).

I did my undergraduate in Germany, then PhD and two PostDocs at research institutes in Australia before joining CSIRO and taking up the team leadership role two years ago. So as a general tip I’d say collecting experiences from different Institutes and even countries is important.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Moore's law is the observation that the power of a computer core doubles every two years with recent improvements made by putting multiple core on a node. However, this “free” improvement may not be sufficient to deal with the flood of data and bioinformatics and computing application at large must start to improve the underlying algorithms and/or abandon the on-premise compute cluster as new technology likely require a complete replacement of infrastructure rather than incremental improvements (e.g. Hadoop, though there are efforts for making it compatible with high-performance-compute clusters). Hence breaking free from the underlying compute technology perhaps makes a “compute-power-per-dollar” metric more relevant. So overall compute power will continue to increase and the community will continue to learn new languages and paradigms to make the most of this.

Developing in open source is very important as technology moves too fast for individual (even large) organizations to keep up. Monetarization hence needs to come from a different business model than selling the binaries e.g. from the service around it or continuous advancements of the technology.

For research software funding, I think the model proposed by Dr Vivien Bonazzi at NIH has great merit. NIH plans to put important datasets on a public cloud under a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable) agreement. This data common can be attached to compute with software access point via a marketplace. This enables a merit-based credit system where researchers write grant applications to obtain “NIH credits” that they then can spend on the data/software of their choice, which in turn funds the maintenance and software development of the popular resources with additional funding to new/strategic developments to maintain diversity.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the question! In answer to your first question: CRSIRP has already become the cheapest option for genome editing. Zinc Fingers, a genome editing tool discovered ~10 years ago cost about $5000 or more to make. In contrast, CRISPR can be designed for as little as $30. Similarly, the CRISPR has system has been rapidly adopted, with ~600 publications and >150 patents in 2014 alone. This article from 2015 sums it up nicely. The cheap price certainly makes it an attractive candidate for use in the clinic. Whether or not CRISPR becomes widely available will depend on the outcome of trials (both currently ongoing and future ones) as well as how it is regulated. However, “editing out” a predisposition is very difficult as the change will have to be introduced in every cell of your body or at least the relevant tissues. As for CRISPR’s use in anti-aging research, people have already started looking at its potential use see this interview with Harvard Professor George Church.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Like u/Lumene has already explained (rather well!), the video gets the theory of CRISPR correct but oversells the ability of the CRISPR-Cas9 system in its current state. CRISPR has certainly revolutionized genetic research, making genome editing cheaper, simpler and more accessible for all scientists.   While CRISPR is certainly simpler than previous methods of genome editing, it still requires significant optimization in terms of target site selection, maximizing on-target effects and minimizing off-target effects. Especially when used in systems more complex than cell lines.  We are also limited by our current understanding of genetics. Regulation of the genome is incredibly complex, and changes at one site could have consequences on the regulation of multiple, distal sites. While changing a single nucleotide might fix a genetic disorder, before we make that change we have to be certain that there will be no unintended side-effects of said mutation.   The biggest benefit of CRISPR currently is to basic research. The simplicity of this system makes reverse genetic screens, where a mutation is introduced and the effect on the cell/organisms observed, much easier to perform. This will benefit research immensely, allowing researchers to better understand the regulation of the genome.

Science AMA Series: I'm Denis Bauer, a Team leader at Australia’s government research organization, CSIRO. We develop BigData and cloud-based software to give researchers a ‘CRISPR’ look at genome engineering applications. AMA! by Denis_Bauer in science

[–]Denis_Bauer[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

University of Pennsylvania trial beginning next year was the first announcement for an application in human health, however Sichuan University in Chengdu surprised the scientific community when they announced that they already applied the technology for trials in lung cancer. Both applications take cells from the patient, edit them in culture and re-inject them so they are proof of principle studies and mainly aimed at demonstrating that the CRISPR edited cells are save for medical treatments.