Our Bioinformatics service is here! RNAdia for the Nadia platform now has the option to purchase data analysis services, as easily as you would buy a reagent kit.
Most single cell researchers will be well versed in the headache that bioinformatic can be but there’s no need to despair because our bioinformatics team is here! Because our service offers you dedicated support from one of our team members for all your queries and needs, we thought it was important you get to know your new partner in data analysis!
So let’s introduce you to our Bioinformatics consultant Dr. Sebastian Müller
Tell us a little about yourself
I’m a bioinformatician specializing in high throughput sequence analysis and machine learning.
I graduated at University of Jena in Germany and received a PhD in bioinformatics at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology working on fungal disease and natural product discovery.
I spent 8 years as a postdoc at the University of Cambridge focusing on plant science, epigenetics, small RNAs and single cell sequencing and have been working as a consultant for various biotech companies and contributed to several open-source software projects.
In 2020 I founded Alva Genomics, a consultancy specializing in providing bioinformatic services around data analysis and custom software solutions in the NGS space.
How did you come to be working in this topic/ field?
I’ve always been passionate working with sequencing technologies. The invention of single cell sequencing immediately captured my interests for its immense potential until now.
What is your role within Dolomite Bios single cell analysis service?
I’ve been developing and improving an automatic single cell analysis pipeline adapted to analyse data from Dolomite Bio’s Nadia platform.
What aspects did you find most important when developing the single cell analysis pipeline for Dolomite Bio?
Having a good overview about the available software (there is a lot – but rather scattered and unstructured out there). I find it most important to combine those along with the actual needs of customers as well as R&D which involves listening to both carefully. It is easy to write code – but hard to make it usable!
Which are your favorite tools for single cell data visualization?
– Cellenics by Biomage
– R (Seurat and Bioconductor ecosystems)
What advice would you give researchers planning their first single cell projects?
Since my expertise is the computational side of things, so is my advice: Even though this technology can be daunting at first given the plethora of available software, it is easy to lose sight of proper experimental design. One of the most recurring mistakes I have seen in my career is poor experimental design (e.g. confounding factors, no replicates etc.). Even the best tools won’t give you meaningful results with those. So, my advice: talk to a statistician/bioinformatician before (not after!) conducting an experiment.
What are common mistakes or problems when planning single cell projects?
1. Not talking to a bioinformatician when designing the experiment
2. Skipping over QC too fast (I know it’s boring, but important)
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
A scientist!
Fun fact about yourself?
Whilst living in Cambridge one of my favourite pubs was Panton Arms for its excellent Ale selection (especially Mosaic Ale!). Only later I learned this to be birthplace of the idea leading to modern sequencing technology (NGS) [1] which is until now base of most of my work and research.
I’ve been invited to the Nobel Price award party of Gregory Winter in Trinity College.
[1] https://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/news/dna-sequencing-pioneers-awarded-millennium-technology-prize
What do you enjoy doing when you are not working?
Dancing Salsa and Kizomba, Karate, Sailing, Skiing
Your top 3 favorite Podcasts/Books/movies?
The Physician (Noah Gordon), Idiocracy (Mike Judge), pretty much all of British stand-up comedy
Thank you for taking the time to get to know Sebastian, click the links below to meet our other bioinformatics team members, Linh Hoang and Xuan Nguyen, here:
