Report about the 8th Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium, May 2005

The 8th Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium was held on May 22, 2005, at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). Approximately 500 people attended the meeting, which was chaired by Chen Keasar of BGU and Ron Shamir of Tel Aviv University.

David Sankoff, University of Ottawa, gave the opening keynote speech: "Rearrangements of partially ordered genomes." Rivka Carmi, BGU, spoke about "Mapping genes in isolated populations" to close the day. Other speakers included Michael Levitt of Stanford and Israeli researchers Roded Sharan, Naama Barkai, Zohar Yakhini, Yael Mandel-Gutfreund, and Danny Barash.

Prizes were awarded for the two best student posters of 70 that were exhibited. All abstracts are available on the conference website.

• Yuval Tabach, Michael Milyavsky, et al., Weizmann Institute, "A promoter architecture of human cell cycle genes implements a fuzzy-logical integration of two tumor suppressive pathways during in-vitro transformation"
• Avraham Ben-Shimon et al., Weizmann Institute, "Looking at enzymes from the inside out: The proximity of catalytic residues to the molecular centroid can be used for identification of active sites."

Ron Unger of Bar Ilan University was chosen president-elect of the Israeli Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

The 2006 Symposium will be part of the 5th European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) in the resort town of Eilat, Israel.