Workshops 2011

Personalised Medicine for the European Citizen

Workshop organiser:
Carsten Carlberg: University of Luxembourg

Almost all diseases have a genetic component: we are born with a genome that imbues us with a certain risk of disease. The earlier we can detect and quantify this risk, the earlier we can intervene.
The rapid developments in biomedical research can thus enable a revolution in health care. The challenges ahead are significant, and it is becoming clear that regulatory systems operate in a far more complex ways than we might have previously thought. Nevertheless, these technologies could lead to innovative therapies, limit adverse effects of treatments, increase the quality of clinical care, create an optimal fit between a patient and a treatment, and decrease the costs of healthcare. This workshop is aimed at identifying the essentially required ingredients and structure for a foresight effort in this area.
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Date and venue: January 13-14, 2011; Luxembourg City, Luxembourg

Affinity Proteomics

Workshop organisers:
Mike Taussig: Babraham Research Campus, Cambridge, UK
Cheryl Smythe: Babraham Research Campus, Cambridge, UK

The aims of this workshop will be to review state-of-the-art technologies for European and worldwide affinity proteomics programmes. Previous meetings on this topic funded by the ESF
Functional Genomics Programme have been highly influential in defining the field, leading firstly to the EC ProteomeBinders Coordination Action (recently ended) and a major practical follow-on project, AFFINOMICS, which will be represented at the workshop.
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Date and venue: March 14-16, 2011; Alpbach, Austria

Wilhelm Johansen Symposium: the impact of deep sequencing on the gene, genotype and phenotype concepts

Workshop organiser:
Niels Tommerup: Wilhelm Johansen Centre for Functional Genome Research, Copenhagen, Denmark

A century for the terms gene, genotype and phenotype (Wilhelm Johannsen 1909) will be celebrated by sessions focussing on the impact that high-throughput sequencing technologies will have on the concept of genes including non-coding genes, on the establishment of novel genotype- phenotype relationships, dissection of complex inheritance patterns, and development of systems biology tools and functional models of complex disorders.
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Date and venue: March 21-23, 2011; Copenhagen, Denmark

Advances in Proteomics

Workshop organiser:
Michal Dadlez: Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, Poland

Due to the dynamic character of proteomes and sensitivity of mass spectrometers, small variation in protocols and in data analysis might leaded to problems with data reproducibility. This workshop concentrates on methodologies of sample preparation for proteomic
measurements, to achieve best performance, on proteomic data interpretation and results validation, aiming at extraction of reliable information.
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Date and venue: April 11-15, 2011; Zakopane, Poland

2nd International Workshop on Orthology Inference and Applications

Workshop organisers:
Erik Sonnhammer: Stockholm University, Sweden
Christophe Dessimoz: ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Javier Herrero: EBI, UK
David S Roos: University of Pennsylvennia, USA

The identification of orthologs, genes in different species that are evolutionarily the closest, has become a critical prerequisite for many research projects, including important medical/pharmaceutical applications. This workshop will address important issues in orthology identification by bringing together researchers in the field, with the aims of improving the newly available ‘gold standard’ dataset, evaluating alternate ortholog identification approaches, improve interoperability among orthology databases, and improve orthology-based protein function inference.
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Date and venue: June 17-19, 2011; Hinxton, UK

From Phenotypes to Pathways - Inferring network architecture from perturbation maps

Workshop organisers:
Florian Markowetz: Cancer Research UK, Cambridge, UK
Michael Boutros: German Cancer Research Centre, Heidelberg, Germany

This meeting will address two key questions in functional genomics: (1) how to infer cellular networks from phenotypes of single and combinatorial gene perturbations; and (2) how to use integrative approaches for inferring genetic variants driving disease networks.
There will be 40 leading European researchers, half with a computational, half with an experimental background, to foster collaborations between disciplines.
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Date and venue: September 15-17, 2011; Cambridge, UK