The workshop 'Genome Computing' or Computational Genomics intends to present an overview of the state of the art in computational aspects of modern DNA research. This is a broad topic that covers many different aspects, ranging from primary access to data, to advanced calculations on the macro-molecular structure of DNA. In the present research community the awareness is slowly growing that computational tools will become an essential element for the development of the field. This workshop intends to inform both policy makers and researchers about the expected impact of advanced computational methods and the infrastructural prerequisites required for using the various methodologies. It is expected that the input for computational genomics will come from various scientific disciplines: human-, animal- and plant genetics, microbiology, biochemistry, informatics, statistics and computational chemistry. This is also the expected Workshop audience and the various interests are reflected in the provisional program.
| 09.15 | Roy Williams Center for Advanced Computing Research Pasadena, CA. USA Title: Web Interfaces to Scientific Data Archives Roy Williams read Mathematics at Cambridge, England, and a took PhD in Physics from Caltech in 1983. His current research goals focus on providing meaningful access by people to scientific data, and also on connecting complex and diverse software systems into something that is greater than the sum of the parts. Scientific data is being created at a great rate -- remote-sensing images of the Earth, high-resolution 3D images of the brain, astrophysical, social science, genetic and ecological data -- but it seems to be available only to a limited priesthood of professionals in the field. Broadening the access will provide a clearer view of the world to those who are interested, whether they are research scientists or schoolchildren. Hence my interest in databases, user interfaces, public access to Government-funded data, and scientific visualization. If it is raw data that is available, there must be software to mine it: to search for small signals in noisy data, to classify and count, to extract information from the data. This means that simple access is not sufficient, and computing services must also be there. Services that allow a user to think about the task at hand to the greatest possible extent, rather than thinking about translating their requirements into a language the machine can understand. |
| 10.30 | Coffee Break |
| 11.00 | Christos Ouzounis EBI; European Bioinformatics Institute Hinxton, UK Title: Knowledge discovery in the Genome Era Christos Ouzounis is Group Leader at the EBI, The European Bioinformatics Institute. The EBI maintains the EMBL and SWISS-Prot databases as well as various other databases such as IMGT, NDB, PDB, Flybase and RHDB. Data can also be submitted to EBI via the WWW. The major databases can be queried and similarity searches can be done with FASTA and BLITZ. Among Dr. Ouzounis' scientific interests are theory of string and biological sequence comparison, sequence database mining and gene discovery. He is currently involved in projects on computational analysis of model genomes, evolution of ancient protein families and expert systems systems for sequence analysis. |
| 14.00 | Hans-Werner Mewes Max-Planck-Institut f. Biochemie Martinsried Institute for Protein Sequences (MIPS) 82152 Martinsried, Germany Title: What can we learn from the yeast genome? Hans-Werner Mewes is the head of MIPS, the bioinformatics group of the GSF at the Max-Planck-Institut f. Biochemie contributing to the PIR-International Protein Sequence Database, the European Yeast Functional Analysis Program (Eurofan), the European Sequencing of Arabidopsis thaliana (ESSA), the German Network for Functional Analysis in Yeast and the European Molecular Biology Network (EMBnet). MIPS manages two large scale sequencing projects, Yeast and Arabidopsis Thaliana and is involved in research on software systems for completely automatic and exhaustive analysis of protein sequence sets - from individual sequences to complete genomes. |
| 15:00 | Tea Break |
| 15.30 | Gert Vriend European Molecular Biology Laboratory Heidelberg, Germany Title: GPCRDB: a large scale database integration project with direct medical implications Gert studied biochemistry at the university of Utrecht, The Netherlands and got his PhD in 1983 at the agricultural university of Wageningen, The Netherlands. His PhD project was the study of the assembly process of plant virusses using NMR, EPR, etc. He post-doc-ed in Purdue, Indiana, USA on the Xray structure of the common cold virus, and in Groningen, The Netherlands where he worked on several structures while starting the WHAT IF project. Since 1989 he works at the EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany, where he continued working on (and with) the WHAT IF program. His main topics of present interest are: Model building by homology, Structure verification, GPCR databases, and Application of computers in wet biology. |
| 16.15 | Forum Discussion and Concluding Remarks Charles Buys Medical Genetics University of Groningen Title: The Future of Computational Genomics in the Netherlands |