212: Chapter 212 Holy crap, Zhao Shen is here!

Facing the senior students' teasing, Zhao Yang had a smile on his face.

"How could that be? I never intended to give up on Biology."

Zhao Yang said with a smile as he looked at these familiar faces.

"Don't just stand there, take a seat. I'll pour you a glass of water."

Gu Qing walked over to the water dispenser, took a disposable paper cup, filled it with warm water for Zhao Yang, and handed it to him.

"Thank you." Zhao Yang took the cup.

While the few of them were chatting, the office door inside the laboratory pushed open.

Professor Gu Ming walked out while looking down at a stack of printed literature in his hand, saying, "Gu Qing, is the concentration of that RNA sample we mentioned last week not quite right? The sequencing company gave feedback saying the library construction failed..."

Mid-sentence, Professor Gu Ming looked up and immediately saw Zhao Yang standing in the middle of the lab.

Professor Gu Ming's footsteps paused, his hand holding the literature froze in mid-air, and a look of surprise flashed across his face before it broke into a smile.

"Zhao Yang! Why are you here, kid?"

Professor Gu Ming walked over quickly and looked at Zhao Yang with delight.

"I've been seeing your news online every day lately—first solving the twin prime conjecture, then publishing at NIPS, and recently being invited by MIT as a visiting scholar. Your news never stops! You're an academic star now!"

Professor Gu Ming made a joke, his tone full of admiration for Zhao Yang.

The vast majority of professors would admire a genius student under their wing.

Zhao Yang also smiled. "Professor Gu, you're overstating it. No matter how much of an academic star I am, I'm still an intern in your lab, aren't I? Look, haven't I come back to the lab to report for duty?"

"Back to the lab to report?"

Professor Gu Ming was stunned for a moment. He looked at Zhao Yang with disbelief and sought confirmation, "Everyone has been chatting privately lately, saying you'd definitely go into pure mathematics or to Silicon Valley for artificial intelligence. What, you still plan to continue with Biology?"

In Professor Gu Ming's view, with the talent Zhao Yang had shown in the fields of mathematics and computer science, any path he chose to follow would lead to a boundless future.

In contrast, current research in Biology was too bitter and tedious; it was difficult to reach a final verdict based on individual talent alone like in mathematics. It often required long experimental cycles to grind out results.

More importantly, many times, biological experiments don't rely entirely on individual talent; sometimes they require a certain amount of luck, and sometimes they require top-tier experimental equipment.

Regardless, Professor Gu Ming couldn't understand why Zhao Yang would want to come back to do Biology.

Wasn't this wasting his own talent?

Seeing the puzzled looks from Professor Gu Ming and those around him,

Zhao Yang smiled and spoke.

"How could I not do Biology?"

"Biology is the discipline that explores the essence of life. I told you before that I am very interested in this field."

He looked at Professor Gu Ming and cut straight to the chase: "Professor Gu, I've come back this time because I want to continue staying in your lab. If there are any new topics or experimental projects, we can work on them together."

Hearing this, Professor Gu Ming was naturally overjoyed and agreed without the slightest hesitation.

"I couldn't ask for more! If that brain of yours can continue to be used in our research group, it would definitely be a lethal weapon."

Professor Gu Ming laughed heartily, then waved his hand. "Since you plan to come back, then perfect, let's go to the conference room. I'm currently having a headache over a recent project. Let's have a brief group meeting, and I'll sync you up on the progress while we're at it."

Gu Qing and the other two seniors also put down the work in their hands and followed him into the small conference room nearby.

Everyone sat around the conference table. Gu Qing sat diagonally across from Zhao Yang and took out her work notebook.

Professor Gu Ming placed the literature in his hand on the table, his expression becoming rigorous as he entered work mode.

"Zhao Yang, since you're back, I won't hide anything. Our lab recently took on a General Program project from the National Natural Science Foundation."

Professor Gu Ming turned on the conference room projector and connected his laptop.

A complex gene expression regulatory network diagram appeared on the screen.

"This project is about the research of drought resistance mechanisms in a specific crop under severe drought stress."

Professor Gu Ming pointed to the nodes on the diagram and said,

"Our early stage thinking was very clear. By extracting crop leaf RNA from a drought-treated group and a normal control group, we performed high-throughput transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq). We were trying to find those key drought-resistance genes whose expression is significantly up-regulated under drought conditions."

"Where is the current difficulty?" Zhao Yang asked directly while looking at the diagram on the screen.

Since it was sequencing, there would be ready-made data. With data, it would be easy for him to handle.

Professor Gu Ming sighed and said somewhat helplessly, "The difficulty lies in the fact that the volume of data is too large, and the noise is extremely severe."

"The sequencing company sent the data back; there are several terabytes of raw sequencing sequences (Reads). Although we understand some basic bioinformatics analysis and can use existing commercial software to align with the reference genome and calculate expression levels, however..."

Professor Gu Ming tapped the table. "However, we found that in the data obtained from this sequencing, there are a large number of false-positive differentially expressed genes. Because this crop's own genome is very large and complex, containing a large number of repetitive sequences."

After aligning with conventional software, tens of thousands of differential genes were identified, making it impossible to conduct downstream validation experiments. We don't know which one is the master switch gene that truly plays the core regulatory role."

The senior with glasses beside them also added with a bitter face, "Yeah, God Zhao. For over a week now, we've been staring at those volcano plots and heat maps every day until our eyes are nearly blind. The few candidate genes we found all failed to meet expectations when we did real-time fluorescent quantitative PCR validation. Now the entire project is stuck at the data analysis step and can't be pushed forward."

After listening, Zhao Yang thought for a moment.

Soon, he roughly understood Professor Gu Ming and the others' predicament.

Biologists are good at designing experiments, extracting samples, and performing validations, but when faced with massive high-dimensional sequencing data, if they only rely on those packaged commercial software or open-source pipeline scripts available on the market, it's easy to fall into a data quagmire.

This is because those ready-made software are based on general statistical models and cannot perform underlying algorithmic optimization for specific complex genomes.

"So, what you need now is a more precise algorithm to dig out the core nodes with true biological significance from these tens of thousands of false-positive noises, right?"

Zhao Yang looked at Professor Gu Ming and asked.

"Exactly."

Professor Gu Ming nodded.

"But our lab doesn't have any professional bioinformatics analysis big shots. We originally counted on these graduate students to screen slowly, but the progress is just too slow."