ISMB/ECCB 2007 will feature six Special Session half-day presentations throughout conference July 22 – 25. These sessions have the purpose of introducing the ISMB/ECCB community to relevant scientific issues and topics that are typically not within the focus of an ISMB/ECCB meeting. Program information on each of the Special Sessions is noted below.

Special Session 1:
Private fears in public places? Ethical and regulatory concerns regarding human genomic databases
Organizer(s): David Gurwitz, gurwitz@post.tau.ac.il, Tel-Aviv University and Barbara Prainsack, barbara.prainsack@univie.ac.at, University of Vienna

Special Session 2:
Cheminformatics
Organizer: Matthias Rarey, rarey@zbh.uni-hamburg.de, Center for Bioinformatics, University of Hamburg

Special Session 3:
Genetic networks: Inferring pathways by combinatorial perturbation
Organizer: Frederick ‘Fritz’ Roth, froth@hms.harvard.edu, Harvard Medical School

Special Session 4:
Computational epigenetics and chromatin regulation
Organizer: Michael Q. Zhang, mzhang@cshl.edu, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Special Session 5:
Computational Approaches to the Modern RNA World
Organizer: Ivo Hofacker, ivo@tbi.univie.ac.at, University of Vienna

Special Session 6:
Dry work in a wet world: Improving methodology and access of computational methods in Systems Biology
Organizer(s): Ewan Birney, birney@ebi.ac.uk, European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute