Questions and Answers

1. What was the major objective of your project and what was your plan to achieve it? 

The main objective of my project was to identify novel genetic biomarkers, flagships for future cancer drug innovations. Specifically, I plan to discover novel new biomarkers by conducting standard procedure single cell RNA analysis towards both epithelial cell subtypes and immune cell subtypes, utilizing clinical data and implementing statistical models to recognize potential genetic risk factor genes, associating statistically significant NSCLC risk factor genes to potential cell subtypes, and identifying which biomarkers have protein binding pockets to allow for future drug design innovations. 

    a. Was that goal the result of any specific situation, experience, or problem you encountered?  

I lost my grandfather to cancer. Although he had always followed an active and incredibly healthy lifestyle, he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer when I was five– and the thought that someone as strong and robust as my grandfather could be defeated planted a seed for my obsession with curing cancer. 

    b. Were you trying to solve a problem, answer a question, or test a hypothesis?

I decided to focus my research on NSCLC because it accounts for 80%-85% of all deaths resulting from lung cancer, which holds the highest mortality rate within all 36 cancer types. Moreover, previous literature lacked emphasis on the tumor microenvironment, whose heterogeneity affects tumor genesis significantly. Thus, I wanted to assist the current bottleneck on NSCLC treatments by exploring the NSCLC tumor microenvironment and use bioinformatics techniques to discover novel biomarkers to provide new directions to NSCLC drug design and innovation. Ultimately, this led me to hypothesize that there exists undiscovered or untapped biomarkers within the NSCLC tumor micro-environment. 

2. What were the major tasks you had to perform in order to complete your project?

The major tasks I had to perform includes (i) standard single cell sequencing analysis for stromal cells, (ii)standard single cell sequencing analysis for epithelial cell-subtypes, (iii) standard single cell sequencing analysis for T-cell subtypes, (iv)InferCNV, (v) functional enrichment analysis, (vi) PPI and Hub Gene calculation, (vi) clinical prognostics analysis, (vii) correlation analysis between immunological components and cancer risk factors, and (viii) protein binding pockets detection.

    a. For teams, describe what each member worked on.

I worked alone for this project.

3. What is new or novel about your project?

Both my computational methods and contributions represent novelty in present day NSCLC research. I developed the framework of my project based on the hundreds of literature reviews and journal articles that I referenced. Currently, EGFR, ALK, ROS1, BRAF V600E, MET, RET and NTRK are the major previously identified genetic biomarkers of NSCLC. This study identifies 13 more potential biomarkers. 

    a. Is there some aspect of your project's objective, or how you achieved it that you haven't done before?

Although I had previous experience with Rstudio coming into the project, conducting this research familiarized me with the tool even more, since approximately 2000 lines of my experiment procedure occurred on Rstudio. Furthermore, while I had a basic understanding of the mechanism of single cell transcriptomics, I have never previously completed a full standard single cell transcriptomics analysis before. To this end, I read over countless literature reviews and single cell RNA sequencing references to familiarize myself with the annotating techniques. Most importantly, I have never read and annotated such a list of extensive and technical papers, analyzed their unique benefits and disadvantages, and planned out a bioinformatics project as I did with this research before. Ultimately, these tasks that I accomplished had significant educational value for me. 

    b. Is your project's objective, or the way you implemented it, different from anything you have seen?

My project targets NSCLC through the TME (tumor microenvironment) lens, an area with scarce readily available resources. While past researchers have effectively adopted single cell RNA sequencing analysis and used it to identify biomarkers, I provided a unique framework to perform the analysis that I did. Namely, my project thinking combines multiple approaches of analysis, from utilizing various modellings of the TCGA dataset to distinct enrichment analysis methodologies and combining these results with protein binding visualizers like Pymol. 

    c. If you believe your work to be unique in some way, what research have you done to confirm that it is?

I believe that my results are extremely unique. I identified 13 untapped NSCLC biomarkers and two of which with significant contributions to potential drug discovery. First, I used STRING to find the PPI and employed Cytohubba to select 6 Hub Genes. With the 6 Hub Genes, I conducted a Kaplan-Meier Curve analysis, finding that NDUFB8 is statistically significant to NSCLC survival rate. Next, I used the TCGA clinical dataset to conduct cox proportional hazard regression analysis, LASSO regression analysis, and display the results of the Random Forest Algorithm, and found 12 cancer risk factors. Combined, I discovered a total of 13 NSCLC biomarkers. Furthermore, I performed correlation analysis between the immunological tumor environment and the 13 biomarkers, finding a high correlation between RNASET2 and CD4+ and T-regulatory T cell subtypes.  

4. What was the most challenging part of completing your project?

I think that the most challenging part of completing my project was the hand annotating portion, a segment of the standard single cell RNA sequencing analysis. This was because I had limited experiences with excel previous to conducting this project, which meant that I had to filter out marker genes manually. Furthermore, given the huge variety of references, many marker genes can be matched up with multiple cell-subtypes, which makes the process difficult. For example, due to the similarities between T-regulatory cell-subtype and CD4+ cell-subtype, they share similar genetic compositions. Fortunately, the violin graph and heat map for the focus genes that I used validated the significance of expression differences of the marker genes that I hand-picked.

   a. What problems did you encounter, and how did you overcome them?

One problem that occurred constantly throughout my project was the size of my dataset. For instance, when I was conducting Copy Number Variation inferences, the dataset that I was using could not be processed through Rstudio, an application that I am mostly proficient and familiar with. This led me to perform certain portions of graphing on Linux instead of Rstudio. While I had to learn Linux from the basics, I overcame my obstacle with data processing by utilizing various online resources from university open-courses as well as Youtube. Moreover, when compiling my codes in Rstudio, the system reported a large number of small errors, and I overcome this obstacle by fixing my code line by line patiently. 

   b. What did you learn from overcoming these problems?

Technically, this process advanced my skills in both Rstudio and Linux significantly, especially, it built me a solid foundation for Linux, a platform that I have never previously utilized. Similarly, the hand annotating process accustomed me with excel, which contributed significantly to my research also in other sections. Moreover, facing these problems taught me patience, teaching me that there is always a way to defeat bottlenecks. Through trying to figure out these technical difficulties myself, a time consuming but fulfilling process, I became a better researcher and student. 

5. If you were going to do this project again, are there any things you would you do differently the next time?

There are three main areas where I would elevate in my project. First, instead of using 19 samples of NSCLC to find statistically significant biomarkers, I would choose an even larger sample size, a process that my new-gained skills in Linux would allow for. A larger sample size will ultimately provide a more accurate and valid overview of the landscape. Second, I would diversify the types of my dataset. In my research, I focused solely on using single cell RNA sequencing. If I were to do this project again, however, I would also utilize bulk analysis, a different type of single cell transcriptomics, to validate my hypothesis. Finally, the main limitation of my study derives from the fact that the 19 samples I selected focus on LUSC, a subtype of NSCLC and not LUAD. This creates a limitation

6. Did working on this project give you any ideas for other projects? 

Working on this project opens up a variety of opportunities in NSCLC research. For example, from the two novel immunological biomarkers with protein binding pockets that my research discovered, I can conduct research to create new, distinct algorithms to calculate the ligand compatibility between the protein binding pockets I detected and potential medical treatments. To specify, I can test if potential drug designs (medical inhibitors to limit the expression of RNASET2 and LAMB1 genes) would successfully aid NSCLC clinical treatments. Moreover, I can produce new algorithms to predict the probability of cryptic protein pockets, similar to the PocketMiner graph neural network, and further expand the predicting algorithm from the probability of potential cryptic pockets to their potential shapes (Meller et al., 2023). This experimentation may potentially help me identify whether other NSCLC risk factor biomarkers have protein pockets unidentifiable by PyMol, the data visualization system that I utilized for my research.

7. How did COVID-19 affect the completion of your project?

My project does not require a wet lab design and thus was not affected by COVID-19.