I was very happy to be able to attend the conference “Immunogenomics of disease: accelerating to patient benefit”, which was hold at the Wellcome Genome Campus Conference Centre in Hinxton (UK) from 6th to 8th of February. The conference was divided in subtopics, in order to deal with different aspects of Immunogenomics, starting with “Systemic autoimmunity and autoinflammation”, “Gastrointestinal autoinflammation and microbiome” to continue with “Immunogenomic approaches and therapeutic advances” and “Genetic and genomic diversity of immune cells”.
Many talks were focused on the topic of expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs), which are nowadays of great interest in the field. The conference was perfectly fitting my research topic as T and B cells repertoires were among the discussed subjects. In particular one project concerning Mucosal Associated Invariant T cells (MAIT) was of direct interest for me and I had the opportunity to discuss the topic with an expert and get interesting ideas for my research. Of great interested was also a tool, in development, to distinguish different immune cells populations proportions from expression data. For example by taking expression profiles of immune blood cells, the software should be able to predict the proportions of the different subpopulations.
Overall I think it was a positive experience both for the networking possibilities but especially for the ideas and suggestions which I got from the talks and the poster sessions, and that I hope to be able to apply in my own research project.
