The NETTAB 2014 Workshop will be a joint event with the Crystal (cl)Year meeting, in the International Year of Crystallography 2014, and it will be followed by the annual meeting of the Centre for Complex Systems in Molecular Biology and Medicine.
The workshop may then represent a virtual bridge between these two events, showing how to manage and elaborate structural and high-throughput proteomics data so that it may be integrated with information from other life sciences disciplines with the aim of reaching a richer description and a deeper understanding of mechanisms and interactions in the involved system: the human being and its physiological and pathological states.
One of the main themes of the workshop will be related to high-throughput proteomic data and their usage in the systems biology. While high-throughput genomic data were from the beginning more available and manageable to systems analysis then proteomic data, recent technological and methodological advances in the latter have contributed to an increase in proteomic studies in a high-throughput way. Combined proteomic technologies can now produce complex, integrated datasets that may also constitute a sound support for systems biology research.
Moreover, the usage of proteomic data for structural bioinformatics and integrative systems biology is not yet sufficiently explored. So, it is now the time to investigate the possible contribution of new ICT technologies to structural bioinformatics, a scientific discipline where computing needs are relevant, especially when evaluated in the light of high-throughput technologies, of the possibilities of analysing human variation both at genomic and at proteomics levels, and of the need of automating all related data analysis procedures.
At the same time, recent advances in genomics and proteomics have produced large datasets enabling for a global analysis of molecular interactions. The integration of computational models and experimental results that is made possible by Systems Biology allows to describe and understand the dynamic properties of biological systems, which are seen as complex signaling networks.
The topics of the workshop will therefore relate to methods, tools, applications, and perspectives on structural bioinformatics, proteomics and integrative systems biology. These issues are very relevant for several research communities which are invited to join forces and create synergies for an interdisciplinary effort aimed at developing new tools at the interfaces of these disciplines.
