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Invited Speakers:

Andrea Sbardellati is a researcher in the Bioinformatics group at the Center for Advanced Studies, Research, and Development in Sardinia (CRS4). He will describe a data analysis pipeline for the genome-wide identification of transcription factor binding sites from ChIP-seq data. Focus will be on mapping and analysis of short-read data obtained by the Illumina technology.

Paolo Uva is a researcher at the Bioinformatics Laboratory of the Center for Advanced Studies, Research, and Development in Sardinia (CRS4). During the course, participants will be introduced to the analysis and interpretation of expression microarray data. Emphasis will be placed on the integration of biological databases (GO, Kegg) for the functional interpretation of the results.

Cedric Notredame is group leader in the Bioinformatics and Genomic program of the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG, Barcelona). He is specialized in the development of methods for multiple sequence alignments. He developed T-Coffee (www.tcoffee.org), a widely used multiple sequence aligners and is also well known for co-authoring the book Bio-informatics for Dummies. He will describe the current state of the art for the alignment of protein and RNA sequences. His approach will focus on the combination of structure and sequence information to build highly accurate multiple sequence alignments.

Henrik Nielsen is an Associate Professor at Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, Department of Systems Biology, Technical University of Denmark. He will present the structural and functional properties of membrane proteins and the special challenges these proteins pose for bioinformatics. He will also discuss how proteins are transported across membranes and give a brief introduction to signal peptides and their prediction. The computational techniques introduced will include hydrophobicity analysis, Artificial Neural Networks and Hidden Markov Models.

Anna Tramontano is a Professor of Biochemistry at the Sapienza University in Rome. She will describe current methods for building models of protein structures and discuss the scope of their applications. Focus will be on modeling by homology, but other techniques such as fold recognition and fragment based methods will also be introduced to the participants.

Domenico Raimondo is a researcher in the Biocomputing Group of the Sapienza University in Rome and his research focuses on protein structural bioinformatics. He will introduce the participants to the practical applications of protein structure analysis and homology-based protein modeling techniques to study protein structure and function.