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Bioinformatics symposium to be held
Leaders in field to gather in Buffalo June 6-8 to discuss cutting-edge science
By JOHN DELLA CONTRADA
Contributing Editor
World-class scientists in the fields of bioinformatics, structural genomics and proteomics will gather next month at a symposium presented by the UB Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics to discuss the cutting-edge science essential for advancements in genetic analysis and drug discovery in the post-genomic era.
The "Frontiers in Bioinformatics" symposium, to be held June 6-8 in the Adams Mark Hotel in Buffalo, will be among the first conferences in the world to explore collaborative approaches to structural genomics, evolutionary genomics and large-scale simulations of genome annotation, according to Jeffrey Skolnick, director of the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics.
"The mapping of the human genome provides the raw material for addressing exciting post-genomic challenges," Skolnick said. "We have at hand the information needed to predict the function of all gene products, correlate these products with disease and develop potential treatments for disease.
"The challenge for the scientists who will gather at the symposium is how to elucidate the function of each gene and extract medically relevant and biologically important information that can lead to medical breakthroughs," he added.
The symposium also will provide an opportunity to introduce the UB Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics to the world's scientific community and enhance global awareness of Buffalo Niagara's world-class, life-sciences resources and facilities, Skolnick said.
"With the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and the other research centers at UB and throughout the region, Buffalo Niagara has the unique capability to move from genetic analysis of disease, to drug development, to clinical trial of a drug in an efficient and synergistic one-stop-shopping scenario," he noted.
Topics to be discussed at the symposium include protein structure and function prediction, prediction of protein-protein interactions, evolutionary genomics, large-scale biological simulations, ligand docking, protein pathways and expression array analysis.
Amos Bairoch of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics will deliver the symposium's keynote address on June 7. Bairoch is responsible for the development of the world's best-known protein-sequence databases: SWISS-PROT, PROSITE and ENZYME. He also is a co-developer of the ExPASy World Wide Web server and its protein-characterization tools, and co-founder of Geneva Bioinformatics, a leading bioinformatics company.
Other prominent scientists who will speak at the symposium include:
Sir Tom Blundell, the Sir William Dunn Professor of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge. The research of Blundell, a pioneer in the field of drug modeling, focuses mainly on growth factors, receptor activation and signal transduction, which are important in cancer and other diseases. Previously, he worked on the enzymes involved in hypertension and AIDS. He is co-founder of Astex Technology Ltd., a drug-development company, and formerly headed Britain's first biotechnology and biological-services research council.
David Eisenberg, director of the UCLA-Department of Energy Lab of Structural Biology and Molecular Medicine. He is a world-renowned expert on X-ray crystallography whose research focuses on the relationship of protein sequence to 3-D structure and function. He has discovered a novel mode of protein interaction called "3-D Domain Swapping." Eisenberg's current work is aimed at learning if 3-D domain swapping can account for protein aggregates such as amyloids.
Michael Levitt, professor and chair of the Department of Structural Biology, Stanford University School of Medicine. Levitt is renowned for his work in computational biology, especially protein folding. His pioneering use of an all-atom potential energy function and Cartesian coordinate energy minimization on an entire protein made molecular dynamics simulations possible. He is a member of the scientific advisory board for the UB Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics.
Minoru Kanehisa, director of the Bioinformatics Center and professor in the Institute for Chemical Research at Kyoto University in Japan. Kanehisa is founder of the KEGG system (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes), a bioinformatics database for understanding higher-order functional meanings and utilities of a cell or organism from its genome information.
Monica Riley, Ph.D., senior scientist at The Josephine Bay Paul Center in Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution in Woods Hole, Mass. Riley is a renowned expert in prokaryotic genomes, especially E. coli. Her research is in the area of molecular evolution and genetics, and includes examination of patterns and processes of sequence evolution.
Harold Scheraga, George W. and Grace L. Todd Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, in the Baker Laboratory of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University. Scheraga's experimental work involves genetic engineering and hydrodynamic, spectroscopic immunochemical and other physicochemical measurements on proteins, synthetic polymers of amino acids and model compounds. One of the pioneers in protein folding, he is a member of the scientific advisory board for the UB Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics.
Skolnick also will present at the symposium. He will discuss prediction of protein structure and function on a genomic scale. A pioneer in the field of bioinformatics for his research in computational biology, Skolnick has developed algorithms for the prediction of protein structure and folding pathways from protein sequence. His research group at UB's Center of Excellence developed PROSPECTOR, an algorithm for protein-interaction prediction that works on proteins for which little structural information exists.
For more information about the "Frontiers in Bioinformatics" symposium or to register to attend, go to http://www.bioinformatics.buffalo.edu, or call 849-6733.