The School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad and C R Rao Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science will be conducting a four day instructional workshop on bioinformatics and a three day international conference on bioinformatics at the University of Hyderabad campus in December. The instructional workshop will be held between December16 and 19 and the international conference would be held from December 20 to 22.

The instructional workshop aims at providing training to the participants in the application of statistical methods, mathematical algorithm and bio-computing in bioinformatics. The specific areas of training will include sequence analysis, pharmacogenomics, immunoinformatics, structure prediction, molecular modeling, docking and drug design.

The four day workshop is divided into two parts wherein topics related to statistical methods and modeling and drug designing would be discussed respectively. The first part would cover topics such as bioinformatics tools using R-Package, introduction to R-Package, SAS software for genomics (JMP genomics), and other related software methods for analysis of microarray gene expression, metabolomics and proteomics.
In the second part would cover topics like semi-empirical and quantum mechanics methods, molecular mechanics and dynamics, homology modelling, molecular modelling and protein structure and compute aided drug designing.

The international conference which is taking place for the first time would address various issues related to statistical and mathematical applications to data pre-processing, normalisation, quality assessment, gene identification, machine learning and inference for graphs and networks, forensic technology, and other areas. 'The aim is to provide a common platform for mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists with biologists in unravelling current trends in instructional processing and retrieving information by invoking the methods in statistics and mathematics,' one of the organisers of the event said.

There would also be plenary talks and paper presentation by eminent scientist. The best paper presented at the contributed paper session of the conference will be awarded the "C R and Bhargavi Rao Prize" of Rs.10000 to a scientist of age 40 or below. The abstract for the conference could send before October 31, 2007.

For more details contact Prof. P Reddana and Dr Anand K Kondapi at School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad. Tel: +91-40-23134571, Fax: +91-40-23010145 E-mail:bioinformaticsuoh@yahoo.com, akondapi@yahoo.com