HANDBOOK

2015 AGTA
Conference
often fails to establish a feasible list of follow-up
candidates. Gene prioritisation methods
promise to identify the most interesting
mutations located in genes using computational
methods, which are ideally applied to
tissue-specific genomic data. Unfortunately,
results from these methods are not usually
readily available to clinicians, as the generation
of such methods, and often their interpretation,
requires trained bioinformaticians.
We have developed an intuitive web-tool for
gene prioritisation in neurological disorders:
brain-coX.
brain-coX incorporates and combines six
large datasets on gene expression in the
developing and ageing human brain. These
datasets are adaptively cleaned of unwanted
variation, maximising information for the
disease of interest. In addition to gene prioritisation
brain-coX’s functionality includes
extensive network visualization options as
well as interactive analysis tools to explore
changes in the gene-gene network along
brain development. In the future, we hope
to extend brain-coX offering interactive tools
that visualize differences between brain
regions.
Currently, our clinical collaborators and we
are extensively testing brain-coX to prioritize
candidate genes for patients with childhood
epilepsies. We find that the use of brain-coX
not only empowers clinicians and biologists
with no programming or significant statistical
knowledge, but also leads to better communication
between collaborators.
brain-coX is available via shiny.bioinf.wehi.
edu.au/freytag.s
SESSION 6
GENOMICS OF PLANTS AND
FINE WINE
Chaired by Professor Justin Borevitz and
Dr Rose Andrew
1515-1555
ORIGIN AND CONSEQUENCES OF
GENETIC AND EPIGENETIC VARIATION
IN ARABIDOPSIS THALIANA AND ITS
RELATIVES
PROFESSOR DETLEF WEIGEL
Max Planck Institute for Developmental
Biology, Germany
BIOGRAPHY
Detlef Weigel is a German-American
scientist. He studied biology and chemistry
in Bielefeld and Cologne, and received
a PhD from the University in Tübingen in
1988. For his postdoctoral work at Caltech,
he switched from Drosophila to plants. He
joined the faculty of the Salk Institute in La
Jolla in 1993, and has been a director at
the Max Planck Institute for Developmental
Biology since 2002. The work of Detlef
and his group has been recognized by
several awards, including the Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz Award of the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft. He is a member
of the US National Academy of Sciences,
the German National Academy of Sciences
Leopoldina and the Royal Society.
The first major finding from the Weigel lab
was that a gene from Arabidopsis thaliana
could dramatically accelerate the flowering
of trees; this established a proof of concept
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