DEEP Annual Meeting 2015

13-14 October 2015, Heidelberg, Germany

From October 13^th to 14^th, 2015 the DEEP project saw its third Annual Meeting. Nearly 60 participants from 17 partner groups gathered at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg to exchange their findings and coordinate the project progress. It was the first consortium meeting after the successful project’s mid-term review in March 2015. In his introductory speech to this year’s annual meeting, Dr Peter Südbeck from the DLR Project Management Agency highlighted the very positive assessment by the international reviewing board.

Each of the 17 subprojects presented their project progress and perspective in this two day symposium with plenty of room for intense discussions and planning. Overall the project reports strongly reflected the “lived” interdisciplinary and the many smaller networks and personal connections that have been established.   

The meeting showed that epigenome data production is running in its full speed and DEEP will soon deliver its first series of complete public data sets to IHEC. These data sets fulfill the highest IHEC standards exclusively produced by NGS-based methods. Each data set encompasses a series of deep and high quality data for DNA-methylation (Bisulfite-Seq), six chromatin-modifications (ChIP-Seq) open chromatin data (DNAseI-Seq and NOMe-Seq) and deep small and large RNA-expression data RNA-Seq).

In his final words Prof Dr Jörn Walter, DEEP coordinator, summarized his main impressions: “Across all our projects we have seen a great progress over the past year. DEEP is right on track by making most out of its interdisciplinary expertise. We will now start with great ambition to publish our first findings in international top quality journals and share our findings and data with our colleagues within IHEC and across the world”.

The next annual meeting will be held in October 2016 at the University of Duisburg-Essen.