Programme News

4th Functional Genomics & Disease Conference

We are pleased to announce that the 4th Functional Genomics & Disease Conference will be held in the spectacular city of Dresden, Germany 14-17 April 2010. This follows on from 3 highly successful conferences in Prague,Oslo and Innsbruck. A wide range of areas will be covered by an excellent line up of speakers. For further information and to pre-register please go to www.esffg2010.org.

Call for proposals for 2009 Science Meetings

The main aim of Frontiers of Functional Genomics is to initiate and promote European, interdisciplinary co-operation in research in all areas of functional genomics.

Therefore the programme invites proposals from potential organisers of science meetings (workshops, schools, conferences) to be held in 2009 on topics with a clear connection to the programme.  These include functional genomics technologies, biomedicine (epigenomics, neurogenomics, metabolomics, pharmacogenomics, personalised medicine), bioinformatics, systems biology, environmental functional genomics, biotechnology, biobanking and impact on society. Further information on the areas of the programme can be found here.

Priority will be given to science meetings taking place in countries that have not yet hosted a meeting. These are Denmark, Luxembourg, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland. Priority is also given to those countries that financially support the programme: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom. The list of participants should include a clear European dimension. Financial support of up to 25,000 Euro per meeting is available, although awards of 15,000 Euro are more usual.

Applicants are welcome to apply for additional funding from other sources for their proposed science meetings.

Application procedure
Submissions must be made online. You will be asked to provide a Scientific Abstract and Summary, a budget breakdown with justification of costs, details of venue, draft meeting programme, brief CV of the main organiser and a list of proposed speakers/participants.

Click here for the online application.

Please read the ESF Guidelines for Proposers and Organisers of Science Meetings for more information.

Deadline
Applications should be received by 17:00 Central European Time on Friday 17 April 2009. Late or incomplete applications will not be considered. It is expected that the outcome will be known by the end of May.

CNIO scientists publish landmark special issue of Genome Biology

The journal Genome Biology in a September 1st special issue publishes the outcome of the second BioCreative (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction in Biology) initiative. This initiative, which is co-organized by two CNIO scientists, is an international effort to assess the state of the art, highlights and future challenges in the development of information extraction and text-mining algorithms applied to biologically relevant tasks.

Efficient access to information contained in online scientific literature collections is essential for life science research. It plays a crucial role from the initial stage of experiment planning to the final interpretation and publication of the results. The biological literature also constitutes the main information source used by expert database annotators and plays an increasing role in systems biology efforts. Information extraction is coming close to a state where it can provide direct links between the publications and databases. Along with the increasing demand for more efficient information access technologies to overcome current limitations of basic information retrieval systems such as Entrez/PubMed or Google Scholar, a considerable effort has been made during the past years to implement techniques for automatically extracting biologically relevant information from the scientific literature.

The BioCreative initiative (BioCreative II - Critical Assessment for Information Extraction in Biology Challenge) is the most influential programme in the area of biomedical text-mining. It brings together researchers from different communities including biological database developers, bioinformaticians, natural language processing experts and journal publishers, to approach biologically relevant problems, set standards and create community resources. It is organized by Lynette Hirschman (MITRE), John Wilbur (NCBI), Martin Krallinger and Alfonso Valencia (both CNIO), who were also the editors of the Genome Biology special issue.

This special issue presents the results of the BioCreative II evaluation. It describes the current capabilities of text mining systems applied to biologically relevant questions and highlights the importance of text mining tools for biological databases. The Genome Biology BioCreative II supplementary issue includes three papers analyzing in detail the comparative evaluation of the results of the three major tasks. Six articles present applied methods from exceptionally performing groups in the tasks of automatic recognition of gene mentions, the extraction of links of human gene database identifiers to abstracts (gene normalization) and the detection of protein-protein interaction information from papers. The protein-protein interaction task has several components including initial article retrieval, recognition of the experimental interaction techniques described in the paper, and highlighting of the text passage that summarizes the interaction events. The special issue also includes a review article, an opinion paper by users and developers and the presentation of the first meta-server prototype for biomedical information extraction - the BioCreative MetaServer, a development coordinated by the CNIO team.

BioCreative II was made possible thanks to the collaboration of the MINT and IntAct protein interaction databases, and attracted the participation of 44 research groups from 13 countries. The MITRE's contributions were supported by the US National Science Foundation, and the ones of CNIO by the EU Network of Excellence ENFIN and by the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute, a platform of the “Genoma España” foundation. The BioCreative assessment workshop was hosted by the CNIO and sponsored by “Genoma España ENFIN, and the European Science Foundation (ESF) Programme on Frontiers of Functional Genomics.

The Third Frontier

Our latest programme newsletter The Third Frontier contains recent news and highlights from the programme. It is available as a pdf here.

Download PDF of The First Frontier.
Download PDF of The Second Frontier.

Call for Short Visit & Exchange Grants

Frontiers of Functional Genomics is offering a number of Short Visits (up to 15 days) and Exchange Grants (from 15 days to 6 months). Projects must be related to the scientific objectives of the Programme and start during 2009.

Priority will be given to applicants coming from and intending to visit laboratories in countries that financially support the Programme: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom.

Conditions of Eligibility
a) Undertake work of high scientific quality in the area of functional genomics
b) Apply to work in a European country other than the country of origin
c) Intend to return to the institute of origin upon termination, so that the applicant's institute may also benefit from the broadened knowledge of the scientist
d) Agree to acknowledge ESF in publications resulting from the grantee's work in relation to the Short Visit or Exchange Grant
e) Provide a report on the activity within one month of the visit
f) Applications from all scientists are welcome, but priority will be given to those early in their career.

Allowance
Short Visit Grants are reimbursed on a per diem basis of 85 EUR plus actual travel expenses up to a maximum of 500 EUR.  Exchange Grants are reimbursed on the basis of an allowance of 400 EUR per week plus actual travel expenses up to a maximum of 500 EUR.  The grants do not cover health insurance, taxes, or retirement scheme contributions.

Application procedure
Submissions must be made online.
Click here for the online application form for Short Visits.
Click here for the online application form for Exchange Grants .

Short Visit Grant Applications should include the following information:

- A short description of the proposed project work (up to 250 words) with the aims of the visit
- A curriculum vitae of two A4 pages maximum
- Full address details of the prospective host(s)
- Proposed starting date and duration
- Estimated travel costs

Exchange Grant Applications should include the following information:

- A description of the proposed project work (up to 1000 words) with the aims and justification of the visit
- A curriculum vitae of two A4 pages maximum, including a resume of research experience and a list of five most recent publications
- A letter of recommendation from someone familiar with the applicant's work
- A letter of acceptance from the host at the receiving institute
- Full address details of the prospective host(s)
- Details of the host's research facilities
- Proposed starting date and duration
- Estimated travel costs

Please read the ESF Guidelines for Grants for more information.

Deadline
Applications should be received by 17:00 Central European Time on Friday 17 April 2009. Late or incomplete applications will not be considered. It is expected that the outcome will be known by the end of May.

Recent Press Releases

Getting to grips with the complexity of disease proteins, 20 Oct 2008 >> more

Human protein atlas will help pinpoint disease, 18 Oct 2008 >> more

Man's best friends recruited in the hunt for disease genes, 16 Oct 2008 >> more

Unpicking the complexity of human diseases, 13 Oct 2008 >> more

Frontiers of Functional Genomics

Frontiers in Functional Genomics is a new ESF programme which will run from June 2006 to May 2011. This follows on from the very successful programme Integrated Approaches for Functional Genomics. The new programme aims to connect the most promising developments in functional genomics technologies with the expanding concept of systems biology, focusing particularly on applications in biomedicine, as well as the environment and implications for society at large. Our activities will bring together a wide range of functional genomics researchers in Europe through workshops, training courses, conferences and grants for short term inter-laboratory visits.

For information on events funded so far for 2008, click here.

To be notified of events and future calls for proposals for workshops, courses, conferences and exchange grants please join our mailing list.