Genomes to Systems Conference 17th – 19th March 2008

This week I have been attending the Genomes to Systems Conference at the Manchester GMEX centre. The week has provided an outstanding series of lecturers from eminent scientists in the field of systems biology.

Monday began with an opening by Professor Hans Westerhoff, (pictured below) and followed with Nobel prize winner Robert Huber with Proteases and their regulation, from structures to mechanisms and application.

The opening day progressed with lectures on disease proteomics, metabolic markers of disease, and deep mining of genomes and was finished up with an outstanding lecture from John Mattick from Brisbane entitled “The eukaryotic genome as an RNA machine”.

The second day began with an opening lecture by Luis Serrano from Barcelona entitled “Evolvability and hierarchy in rewired bacterial gen networks”. The morning was then lectures on systems biology computational environments, single molecule imaging for analysis of biological processes, and “from structure to biology”. I personally attended the systems biology computational environments lectures after attending a number of proteomics lectures yesterday. I find the computational biology sections of systems biology most interesting after our first few months of taught courses. I attended some excellent lectures from Mike Hucka (Caltech) on SBML: present status and ongoing efforts for extensions, Nicolas Le Novére (EBI) on principled annotation or quantitative methods in systems biology, Ursula Kummer (Heidelberg) on COPASI, and finally an excellent lecture from Hiroaki Kitano (SBI, Tokyo) on SBGN: the systems biology graphical notation. We finished the morning with a technology showcase from Thermo Fisher Scientific and Roche diagnostics, who demonstrated the Genome Sequencer FLX system. Lunch included an EBI workshop on Ensembl and ArrayExpress.

For the afternoon, we had talks on emerging strategies for global proteomics, metagenomics approaches to biodeiversity and systems ecology, and facts from the flood: text mining for biomedicine. I attended the proteomics seminars as I have been finding this field interesting of late, and I feel it is of increasing importance in the post human genome project world as we can now link our genome data with the next level of expression – the proteins. I think that disease biomarkers will be crucially important in future disease diagnosis, and in delivering an application for the vast array of data from genome sequencing studies. Scientists have discovered the code, and now we need to understand the program. Anne Dell ( ICL) presented on high throughput glycomics and glycoproteomics, followed by Rob Beynon (Liverpool) on quantitative proteomics, and Simon Hubard (Manchester) on improved informatics for proteomics.

I particularly enjoyed the talks from Anne Dell discussing glycomics, as I had not heard about this field before, and it could be very useful in discovering and assaying biomarkers for cancer. I will be reading some more information on this subject in the future. The talk from Rob Beynon and Simon Hubard were also fascinating new incites in quantitative technique for the previously qualitative field of proteomics.

The day concluded with a plenary lecture from Ron Breaker (Yale) on gene control by metabolite-sensing riboswitches, and later an informal talk was given by Larry DeLucas on Space travel & genomics in space” !!

I am looking forward to tomorrow seminars on dynamic cellular processes, chemical genomics, and pharmacogenomics.