Report about the 7th Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium, May 2004

The 7th annual Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium was held in Jerusalem on May 31st, 2008, with more than 600 attendees from across the country. Prof. Hanah Margalit of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem chaired the meeting.

The keynote speakers were Dr. Eugene Koonin of NCBI, who spoke about "The human gene expression network and genome evolution," and Prof. Howard Cedar of Hebrew University, whose talk "Programming the epigenome" closed the day. John Moult of CARB joined Itamar Simon, Ron Pinter, Gil Ast, Benny Chor, Rotem Sorek, and Itai Yanai to round out the program.

Prizes were awarded for the three best student posters. Abstracts of all 80 exibited posters are available on the conference website.

• Alon Kaufman et al., Hebrew University, "Making sense out of multiple knockout experiments"
• Tal Dagan et al., Tel Aviv University, "Unitary pseudogenes in bacterial genomes: lifestyle and gene loss"
• Elon Portugaly and Matan Ninio, Hebrew University, "HMMERHEAD: HMMer hashing enabled acceleration device."

At the business meeting of the Israeli Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ISBCB), Prof. Ron Shamir of Tel Aviv University replaced Hanah Margalit as Society President. Prof. Marvin Edelman of the Weizmann Institute of Science was elected Vice President.