Notes from the Biomass

The first day of the GCB had two sessions, "RNA structures" and "Sequence Analysis". Peter Stadler himself called the first session "dominated by the RNA mafia", referring to the group around Peter Schuster that Stadler and the other speaker were part of at some point in time.
Their work is probably known to everyone in RNA folding and evolution by the Vienna RNA package . Nice work and talks but I have no real use for studying RNA folding myself. RNA folding is one of good examples where staying in a field that was pronounced dead (when everybody was doing genome sequencing) proved to be very fruitful (when small RNAs appeared).

The highlight of the second session was the biodefense presentation by Tom Slezak from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The problem posed is interesting: how to find the best DNA regions of pathogens that distinguishes pathogenic strains from their avirulent cousins. The results are monitored by PCR for rapid diagnosis but also for surveillance on air filters. I would have hoped for a little more information but some of "the customers" - federal agencies - are secretive about many details. Outside the biodefense application, it would be nice to get information on the "air metagenome".

More tomorrow.

Today, the GCB, Germanys most important bioinformatics conference opens in Hamburg. The venue, the university of Hamburg, has a strange touch to it - this was the location of my very first "conference". Not on saving the world from bugs using computers but on fantasy role playing games - back in 1989. Well, I won't get to sleep on some floor this round and with WLAN set up, expect some posts on the conference later.