Announcing the first COMBREX Workshop for Computational and Experimental Determination of Protein Function
COMBREX (Computational Bridge to Experiments) is a new NIH funded effort that aims to increase the pace of experimental determination of the function of large and high priority gene families in bacterial genomes. Led by Richard Roberts (New England Biolabs) Simon Kasif (Boston University) and Martin Steffen (Boston University), this effort will form a consortium of experimental and computational biologists that would collaborate directly to test the predicted functions or specificity of high-priority genes. Central to this effort would be the creation of a community web-based database that would allow computational and experimental scientists to communicate easily and assist experimentalists in identifying high-priority genes with high-quality computational predictions. Experimentalists will be able to submit bids (proposals) to validate individual predictions, and if successful, will receive modest funding from COMBREX to perform the validation. The website can be found at <http://combrex.bu.edu/>. A workshop to discuss issues related to the formation and operation of COMBREX will take place on Wednesday, September 15, 2010, as part of the 18th Annual International Meeting on Microbial Genomics at Lake Arrowhead, CA, outside of Los Angeles. A preliminary program can be found at http://www.mimg.ucla.edu/arrowhead2010/program.html (COMBREX is formerly SciBay). Confirmed speakers include Richard Roberts, Simon Kasif, Manuel Ferrer (CSIC, Madrid), Patricia Babbit (UCSF), John Gerlt (Illinois), Peter Karp (SRI), Alexander Yakunin (Toronto) Steven Brednner (UC Berkeley) and Bruno Sobral (Virginia Tech). The morning session will provide an overview of COMBREX, including both the experimental and computational challenges, related talks, and a description of topics to be discussed by breakout groups. These groups will convene in the afternoon to discuss the topics and prepare a short summary, for presentation to the entire workshop after dinner. Topics to be discussed by the breakout groups will roughly divide into the following areas: (1) whole genome annotation, (2) assessment of computational predictions, (3) use of structure to predict function, and (4) infrastructure for function annotation. General topics to be discussed include: 1. How to prioritize predictions? 2. How to evaluate experimental bids? 3. How to handle non-enzymatic proteins? 4. How best to handle predictions/phenotypes from high-throughput experimentation. A key desired outcome of the workshop is identifying opportunities and catalyzing collaborations between computational and experimental biologists. We hope you will be able to join us for this event. You can register at http://www.mimg.ucla.edu/arrowhead2010/registration.html For further information please contact the organizers: Co-chairs: Martin Steffen, Boston University, [email protected] Iddo Friedberg, Miami University, [email protected] Steering Committee: Simon Kasif and Richard J. Roberts -- Iddo Friedberg http://iddo-friedberg.net/contact.html _______________________________________________ BBB mailing list [email protected] http://www.bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bbb
