The Inference of Nature: Cause and Effect in Molecular Biology, Sarah Teichmann

Theoretical approaches have always played an important role in biology, dating back to Mendel’s peas. In today’s era of genomics and big data in biology, statistical and computational tools are even more vital for biologists seeking to infer causation in living systems. To illustrate the range of methods, from modelling to machine learning, and how they contribute to understanding biological mechanisms, Dr. Teichmann will pick examples from some of the core problems her lab has been investigating as case studies. Starting with the assembly of proteins into complexes, she will move on to the single cell revolution in genomics and her quest to develop cell atlases of the human body. She will finish with her work leveraging these atlases to understand how COVID-19 affects the body. The examples will show how intertwined and complementary ‘wet’ (i.e. experimental) and ‘dry’ (i.e. computational/theoretical) approaches are in today’s biology.