Ezequiel Galpern (left) and Ohanna Bezerra: 'VESS has become “a trusted source of high-quality, innovative scientific content.'
The Variant Effects Seminar Series (VESS), hosted online each month by the Atlas of Variant Affects (AVE) Alliance, will celebrate a milestone in June: its 100th presenter since it was launched in 2021.
“This is a milestone that reflects nearly five years of consistent programming, a growing global community, and an enduring commitment to open science," said Lara Muffley, the Alliance’s Director of Program Operation. “The series has featured diverse topics and themes – from emerging experimental techniques in functional genomics, to variant effect prediction, to evolutionary genomics, and to disease mechanism elucidation. This demonstrates the breadth and depth of approaches used to decode the functional consequences of human genetic variation.”
The seminar organizers, speakers, and live audience are multinational, totaling 40 nations, Muffley said. Each live session draws an average of 38 participants from more than six countries, reflecting the series’ broad global appeal. Most of the presentations are posted to the AVE Alliance’s YouTube channel which has over 1,300 subscribers.
One of those subscribers is the VESS 100th presenter: Ezequiel Galpern, Ph.D., a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain.
“I plan to discuss new lines of research related to disentangling the effects of mis-sense variants at a mechanistic level, especially in regard to proteins,” Galpern said of his presentation schedule for June 2. “Been working on these lines of research for more than a year. I joined the Barcelona institute last September.”
Interestingly, the VESS played a role in Galpern’s current position. He watched the December 2021 seminar by his current supervisors Mafalda Dias and Jonathan Frazer to gain insights about her work before he interviewed for the post-doc role.
Muffley said that, for nearly five years of continuous programming, VESS has become “a trusted source of high-quality, innovative scientific content.” She noted that several key insights have emerged:
- Speaker diversity brings a breadth of perspectives and attracts a wide-ranging audience
- Regular programming builds familiarity and is central to community-building and repeat attendance
- Recorded content on accessible platforms, such as YouTube, maximizes reach and enables participation beyond the constraints of live attendance.
The success of VESS, she said, can be attributed to the six-member organizing committee composed of early-career scientists within the AVE Alliance. Most of them are Ph.D. students or post-doctoral fellows. One of those committee members, Ohanna Bezerra, Ph.D., a post-doctoral researcher in Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, commented on the future of the VESS and topics she would like to see presented in future seminars.
“I would like to feature multi-layered functional genomics, bringing together chromatin remodeling, DNA methylation, and transcriptional changes to connect variant effects to regulatory mechanisms,” Bezerra said. “Looking ahead, I would like to see more interdisciplinary researchers to strengthen impact across fields. Seminars focused on the clinical translation of variant effects, including geneticists and patient voices to share their lived experiences, would add a valuable dimension.”
At least one faculty member, Dustin Baldridge, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis, uses VESS sessions as a tool of instruction.
“… My 5-person lab has started a biweekly “Lunch and Learn” experience, during which we watch one of the VESS presentations, and then discuss how it applies to our work and use it as a jumping off point for more in depth learning about a particular molecular biology, statistics, or computational biology topic,” he said. “This has been incredibly valuable for my lab, especially for new members, as they are getting to know the field.”
