Lower turnout by computational biologists

The world’s leading conference for computational biologists has seen a shift in emphasis and a drop in delegate numbers this year.

The 11th International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology this week in Brisbane drew 946 delegates from 45 countries, according to organising committee co-chair Mark Ragan.

That’s 30 per cent down on last year’s event and about the same percentage below original expectations for this year’s conference which is the first held outside North America or Europe.

The lower turnout was traced to “a series of bad coincidences” by International Society for Computational Biology president Michael Gribskov.

They included what he described as slightly paranoid reactions to the SARS epidemic, fallout from the Gulf War which included a substantial hike in airfares and corporate cutbacks on staff travel related to an under-performing economy.

Taking those conditions into account, attendanceat the first ISMB conference held in Asia Pacific was a creditable figure and the quality of papers being presented was unaffected, organisers said.

The types of papers submitted to the conference reflected a shift that is taking place in the field, according Gribskov.

“Papers derived from micro-array experiments formed a huge part of the last few conferences but we have clearly gone a bit past micro-array now.

“I would say we are seeing the beginnings of the push toward higher level descriptions of how cells and tissus work which is probably going to be our work for the next couple of decades.

“We are shifting from a focus on analysing sequences to analysing gene expression and networks of control. What we did in the past was create a catalogue of parts and now we are switching to working out how all the parts fit together.

“One of the things people are working on is how you take not just sequence information, but information about where genes are expressed, and what their function is and are they implicated in disease and bring all that information together so you can cross index it.”

Such information systems involve enormous information processing loads which a few years ago might have formed an insurmountable cost barrier for many research institutions.

“One of the things that is saving us is that the cost of computing has dropped dramatically in the past decade,” Gribskov said.

Membership in the society he heads had been growing at an average of 30 to 40 percent annually though this year that tailed off to about 10 percent, he said.

Affiliated societies set up at regional and national levels represent several thousand additional members and they are growing in number.

The first Australian Society for Computation Biology is being organised at this year’s conference and the conference also coincides with the formatino of the special interest group for bioinformatics by industry association Ausbiotech Ltd.