UofT BioHacks 2016 Summary

The 2016 UofT BioHacks event was a great success! Our event took place from March 12th to

March 13th in the Bahen Center for Information Technology. We had a total of 432 registrants,

17 judges and 30 event organizers/volunteers. However due to limited space, only 154

individuals were accepted for a total of 42 teams. The event had a 100% turnout.

Our opening keynote was presented by Hui Yuan Xiong, co-founder of Deep Genomics from Dr.

Brendan Frey’s lab. Hui gave a presentation on using deep learning methods for detecting

genomic mutations. Dr. Alan Davidson, professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and

the Department of Biochemistry, presented the closing keynote on computational annotation

of morphogenic phage genes.

We hosted three workshops to provide the participants with the necessary background and

resources to compete in the biohackathon. Synaptive medical also gave an amazing sponsor

workshop on the development of medical technologies.

Workshops

● BLAST+

● BioPython

● Bionode/Bioconductor

● Synaptive Medical

Four challenges were given to the participants for teams that did not want to create their own

project idea.

Challenges

● Creating phylogenetic trees

● Annotating/predicting genes

● Protein prediction from mass spectrometry data

● Prediction of RNA secondary structures

The top three teams received prizes. The first place team received Pebble smartwatches,

second place received portable chargers, and third place received $25 Starbucks gift cards.

Top ten teams

1. Ripped Genes

2. Seneca Sensations

3. Fancy Lab Mice

4. Hacking Bat

5. Easy Seq

6. QGEM

7. Hack Attack

8. Durian Hacks

9. Team Addicted

10. Atmorossa

Ripped Genes was able to impress the audience and judges with their regulatory networks that was able

to model genetic circuits. With their API, they were able to capture the dynamics of turning components

on and off within a cell. You can find more of their project at https://github.com/RippedGenes/

Lastly, UofT BioHacks 2016 was made possible by our sponsors, Ontario Genomics, Synaptive Medical,

Array Systems Computing, Nymi, and The Entrepreneurship Hatchery.

Figure 1: The universities of registrants. 214 from the University of Toronto, 137 from the

University of Waterloo, 19 from McMaster University, 14 from the University of Western Ontario,

6 from Ryerson University and less than 5 from other universities across Canada.

Figure 2: The year of registrants. 178 first years, 112 second years, 78 third years, 39 fourth years, 12 fifth

years and 12 other.

Figure 3: The registrant's academic majors. 151 other, 116 computer science majors, 76

engineers, 59 life science majors, and 29 bioinformatics majors.

Photo Gallery