My top picks for HUPO2018

17^th Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) World Congress takes place from September 30^th to October 3^rd 2018 in Orlando, USA. 

I have to admit, the location at the Loews Royal Pacific Resort, slap bang in the middle of Universal Orlando theme park, is not going to encourage most people to sit in a conference hall listening to talks all day. However, with the high-quality speakers lined up and cutting-edge research topics, the program looks very attractive this year.

Here are some of the talks and sessions I do not want to miss:

1.    Human Cell Atlas plenary talk by Stephen Quake

Human Cell Atlas (https://www.humancellatlas.org/) is an international consortium set up to map all of the cell types, at least a few hundred, in the human body. Altogether, we have around 37 trillion cells, and the idea to study them individually cell-by-cell, rather than bulk material, has been made possible with the advances in single cell genome sequencing technologies.
The Atlas was established in 2016. It will be interesting to hear the latest from the project that managed to attract funding from the likes of Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Wellcome Trust.

2.    Single cell proteomics session

Sticking with the topic of single cell biology, the session about single cell proteomics (which I don’t remember being featured last year) promises to be a hit. Of course, single cell proteomics is nowhere near technologically as mature as, for example, RNA-seq approaches.

One study using “mass cytometry” (Single-cell mass cytometry of differential immune and drug responses across a human hematopoietic continuum), effectively a flow cytometry-derivative method where antibodies are tagged with heavy metal isotopes and detected with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, has captured my attention. That was in 2011; let’s see what 2018 has to offer.

3.    Computational Advances session

These days, analysis of proteomics data is a massive task, and cannot be easily done by hand. That’s why computational proteomics should be on everyone’s mind.

New data analysis tools and algorithms are always popping up, and this session looks like a good mix of machine learning and statistics-based talks. In addition, while the best performing teams for the NCI-CPTAC DREAM Proteogenomics Challenge have been announced in February 2018, I am very much looking forward to the talk about missing data imputation in proteomics based on the combination of a number of leading algorithms from that challenge.