Physical and Chemical Foundations of Bioinformatics Methods

Physical and Chemical Foundations of Bioinformatics Methods

Dresden, Germany

Bioinformatics is a recent discipline developed to organize and analyse the wealth of biological data generated by large scale programmes such as genome projects and structural genomics initiatives. Today, this discipline constitutes a very active and mature area of research that provides efficient algorithms for a variety of applications, including sequence alignment, gene detection, and structure comparison. So far, however, the physical and chemical foundations of the methodologies developed in Bioinformatics have not been explored with the necessary depth. Progress in understanding the structural properties of biological entities, including their physical and chemical interactions, can greatly help to improve existing bioinformatics methods, and ultimately suggesting new approaches.

We aim at bringing together researchers from different scientific communities working within the following three main areas: (i) methodological developments in Bioinformatics, (ii) experimental and (iii) computational studies of the properties of biological macromolecules. Possible synergies between these experimental, theoretical, computational, and statistical analysis approaches are anticipated to take place on two main fronts: to improve our understanding of biological information storage and processing, and to suggest new methods to extract this information from biological sequences. When achieved, such synergies will provide an integrated view of the subject. We hope that our conference can stimulate such an integration, by letting explore the connections between these different disciplines and providing a suitable framework for interaction.

See the conference web page http://www.pks.mpg.de/~pcfbim07/ for online application form, etc.