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Organisers
Jan Komorowski, The Linnaeus Centre for Bioinformatics, Uppsala University and Warsaw University
Philipp Bucher, Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC), Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL)
Introduction
The recent advances in DNA sequencing rapidly change Life Sciences. The latest next generation sequencing instruments can generate as much data in one day as several hundred Sanger-type sequencers, but are operated by a single person. The dramatic changes in cost and time factors have created outstanding possibilities that are now well recognised and appreciated by the life scientists. However, this revolution brings a hefty tag of enormous data quantities. And although many researchers talk about these issues, there has been relatively little focus on the new analytical and modeling possibilities and challenges following the use of these technologies.
The European researchers have been possibly second to the US in terms of introducing the next sequencing technology, but they may have an advantage in modeling and analytical methodologies. We therefore this meeting will bring together the leaders of the bioinformatics and computational biology experts who have already started to manage and analyse the next generation DNA sequence data. One important aspect of this meeting is to exchange information and learn who is doing what, so that repetitive efforts may be avoided. Another aspect is to find out about various ongoing projects and aim to find complementarities of all sorts, both computational and biological. Finally, the organisers will edit a document that will summarise the status and the planned activities in the contributing states.
We intend to cover as many as possible experimental assays involving ultra-highthroughput sequencing technologies: Sequencing and re-sequencing of complete genomes, genotyping and genetic association studies based on SNPs and copy number variation, transcriptome analysis, DNA methylation mapping, genome-wide chromatinimmunoprecipitation, in vitro and in vivo selection experiments and possibly many more. Another objective of the meeting will be to identify the most relevant and interesting biological systems and disease models to which these new technologies will probably be applied, and to recognise technical limitations imposed by the biological samples and sample preparation protocols. Application in cancer genomics and hereditary human diseases will be a special focus of the meeting. All these topics will be presented and discussed from a bioinformatics viewpoint.
There will be parallel working group meetings, the missions of which will be the identification of the major challenges and bottlenecks in the data analysis pipelines that lead from raw data to biological insights and biomedical applications. Likely topics to be addressed in these meetings include raw data processing, data representation formats, specialised algorithms for analysing tag-count data, machine learning algorithms for recognising functional genomic elements or predicting clinical variables from clinical samples, and new approaches to the integration and systems-wide modeling of data from various assays (e.g. methylation, ChIP-Seq, genotyping, comparative genomics). An important issue that the meeting will attempt to promote is making the sequence data publicly available.
Keynote: Eran Segal, Israel
Esko Ukkonen, Finland
Stefan Haas, Germany
Frank Schwach, UK
Ed Green, Germany
Claes Wadelius, Sweden
Joakim Lundeberg, Sweden
Chandrasekar Kanduri, Sweden
Philipp Bucher, Switzerland
Jan Komorowski, Sweden/Poland
The meeting will be held in Uppsala, which offers one of the world leading biotechnology, biology and medicine environments. Uppsala University, through a generous gift of the Wallenberg Foundation has two platforms for DNA sequencing.
Registration
Registration is not open yet .
