Athens, Ga. – An upcoming symposium on the University of Georgia campus will showcase new developments in the field of bioinformatics and present talks by leading scientists about the opportunities, challenges and visions for bioinformatics and systems biology, considered by many the most rapidly growing field in science now.
The Second Annual Computational and Systems Biology Symposium will be held here on March 23 in Masters Hall of the Georgia Center for Continuing Education Conference Center and Hotel.
Featured speakers are Andrew Z. Fire, Stanford University geneticist and co-winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi); Donna Albertson, Cancer Research Institute, University of California San Francisco; and Eberhard Voit, professor and GRA Eminent Scholar in biomedical engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Other featured speakers are Maryann Martone, neurochemistry, University of California San Diego; Jeffrey Boore, SymBio Corporation; Marvin Frazier, J. Craig Venter Institute; Suzanna Lewis, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Ying Xu, UGA Regents-GRA Eminent Scholar and director of the UGA Institute of Bioinformatics.
“UGA has created the Institute of Bioinformatics and graduate programs to respond to the rapid rise of computational biology,” said Robert Scott, Distinguished Research Professor of Chemistry, associate director of the institute and symposium co-chair. “With the mounting number of sequenced genomes, biological research is adapting to a new paradigm for how to learn about the operation of biological systems.
“Biologists can now collect large databases of information about genes, RNA transcripts, translated proteins and metabolites and then compare their results across several genomes to learn about metabolic pathways, regulatory networks, protein interactions, evolutionary relationships and other systems-level information,” he added. “It is the integrated collaboration among biological, physical, mathematical and computational sciences that drives this new area.”