News

Registration is now open for the second Computational Challenges of the Post-Genomic Age workshop, a two-day symposium open to all scientists and co-sponsored by Sun Microsystems, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The symposium will address the scientific questions combined with computational challenges being posed by bioinformatics and the mapping of genomes, structural genomics, and interactions at the cellular level, and full organ simulations.

Sixteen world-class scientists will address these issues September 13-15, 2001, at the Regal University Hotel in Durham, North Carolina. Registration is available at the symposium Web site:

http://www.sdsc.edu/Workshops/postgenomic/

"Dramatic advances in molecular genetics continue at an ever increasing pace," said conference organizer Andrew Komornicki of Sun Microsystems. "Biologists continue to face the challenge of relating DNA sequence information to three-dimensional protein structures and to the complex transformations that underlie living systems. Thus last year we focused on the progression of biological data from gene sequence information on through protein structure, cell function, and finally on to whole organ simulation. This year we have chosen a somewhat different perspective on the same set of problems."

"As the new century begins, we are seeing an increasing importance of data, data collections, and the computing challenges associated with them," says Fran Berman, director of SDSC and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure. "A large number of communities, particularly in the life sciences, are finding they have enormous amounts of data and they need to be able to analyze it, mine it, and extract knowledge from it."

This symposium focuses on the growing synergy between computational science, high-performance computing, and the biological sciences. A huge amount of data must be stored, analyzed and made broadly available to the scientific community. In addition, advances in computational methods, algorithms, and computers have made it possible to model some biological systems with high accuracy and unveil unique views of how biological processes occur.

The presentations will be on September 14-15. A reception is planned on Thursday evening with the meeting held on Friday and Saturday. A dinner, hosted by the organizes is planned for Friday evening. Speakers from academia and industry will focus on four general topic areas:

• Bioinformatics and Databases,
• Algorithms for Discovery Life Sciences,
• Protein Structure, Function and Integration, and
• From Proteins to Disease.

For more information, contact Andrew Komornicki, Sun Microsystems, 650-786-0003, andrew.komornicki@eng.sun.com. The registration fee is $200, or $100 for post-doctoral researchers and students. The registration deadline is August 31.

The current speakers who have accepted are listed below. They represent world leaders in many branches of biology.

See http://www.sdsc.edu/Workshops/postgenomic/ for the current complete list.

Contacts:
Nancy Clark, Sun Microsystems, nancy.clark@sun.com
David Hart, SDSC, dhart@sdsc.edu

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BIOINFORMATICS AND DATABASES
Lincoln Stein
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Shankar Subramaniam
Department of Bioengineering
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
University of California, San Diego
Tod Klingler
Prospect Genomics, Inc.
Terry Gaasterland
Laboratory of Computational Genomics
Rockefeller University
ALGORITHMS FOR LIFE SCIENCES DISCOVERY
Ming Li
University of California, Santa Barbara
Michael Waterman
Departments of Mathematics and Molecular Biology
University of Southern California
PROTEIN STRUCTURE, FUNCTION AND INTEGRATION
George Rose
Department of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry
Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine
John Moult
CARB
University of Maryland
Herbert Edelsbrunner
Department of Computer Science
Duke University
FROM PROTEINS TO DISEASE
George Church
Department of Genetics
Harvard University Medical School
Bernhard Palsson
Department of Bioengineering
University of California San Diego,
Jeremy Levin
Physiome Sciences, Inc.
Douglas Lauffenburger
Director, Biotechnology Process Engineering Center
Massachusetts Institute of Technology