The 5th European Conference on Computational Biology: Conference Report
The 5th European Conference on Computational Biology (www.eccb06.org) was held on January 21-24 in Eilat, Israel. Approximately 400 delegates from 35 countries attended the meeting, which was chaired by Hershel Safer of the Weizmann Institute of Science and Haim Wolfson of Tel Aviv University.
Tom Blundell, University of Cambridge, gave the opening keynote speech: “Structural Bioinformatics, Cancer and Drug Discovery.” Martin Vingron, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, spoke about “Markov Models in Protein Evolution: The Resolvent Method and Family-Specific Rates” to close the conference. The other keynote lectures included Naama Barkai of the Weizmann Institute of Science on “Principles of Gene Expression Evolution”; Richard Karp of the University of California, Berkeley, on “Combinatorial Algorithms for Regulatory Network Analysis and Pathway Reconstruction”; Burkhard Rost of Columbia University on “Evolution Teaches Protein Function Prediction”; and Jeffrey Skolnick of the Georgia Institute of Technology on “Prediction of Protein Structure, Function and Druggability on a Proteomic Scale.”
The conference included 41 additional oral presentations and a selection of software demos. The first day of the conference was devoted to workshops and tutorials.
The papers and posters were organized into 15 topical areas. Systems Biology was highly represented, with presentations under Transcriptomics; Pathways, Networks and Systems; and Simulations and System Dynamics. Other popular topics included Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics. Newer topics included Biomedicine, Computer-Aided Drug Design, and Metabolomics.
The welcome reception took place on the Dan hotel’s pool terrace; it featured a great food and live music. The festive dinner on final evening started with a bus and walking tour of Timna Park, the site of the world’s most ancient copper mines. The area’s extraordinary natural formations were spectacularly lighted for the nighttime visit. The tour was followed by a classic Bedouin-style dinner at the Enchanted Lake, with a variety of grilled meats and traditional accompaniments, as well as entertainment by a band playing desert music. That same evening, the students organized a dancing party at Eilat’s hottest dance spot, The Three Monkeys Pub.
Prizes were awarded to the three best papers and the three best student papers. The lead authors of the winning papers in the first group were Ariel Schwartz of the University of California, Berkeley, USA; Andreas Hildebrandt of Saarland University, Germany; and Daniel Merkle of the University of Leipzig, Germany. The second group included Fabian Birzele of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Germany; Barak Raveh of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel; and Jennifer Listgarten of the University of Toronto, Canada.
Prizes were also awarded for the five best posters of the 200 that were exhibited: Irena Artamonova of Technische Universitat Munchen, Oranit Dror of Tel Aviv University, Yonit Halperin of Tel Aviv University, Orna Man of the Weizmann
Institute of Science, and Israel Steinfeld of Tel Aviv University.
The welcome reception took place on the Dan hotel’s pool terrace; it featured a great food and live music. The festive dinner on final evening started with a bus and walking tour of Timna Park, the site of the world’s most ancient copper mines. The area’s extraordinary natural formations were spectacularly lighted for the nighttime visit. The tour was followed by a classic Bedouin-style dinner at the Enchanted Lake, with a variety of grilled meats and traditional accompaniments, as well as entertainment by a band playing desert music. That same evening, the students organized a dancing party at Eilat’s hottest dance spot, The Three Monkeys Pub. 