This workshop will be on Monday 21st-Wednesday 23rd May.
Speakers include Alexandre Bonvin, Johannes Soeding, Arwen Pearson, Mark
Sansom, Geerten Vuister, Steve Brewer, Victor Lamzin, Michael Habeck, Jose
Maria Carazo, Torsten Herrman, Marco Biasini, and Ernest Laue.
Please register at:
https://eventbooking.stfc.ac.uk/news-events/integratedsoftware-for-integrative-structural-biology
The workshop is in Cosener's House, Abingdon, UK.
This is a CECAM Collaborative Scientific Software Development meeting, and is
sponsored by CCP4 and WeNMR.
Structural biologists use a variety of software tools to help their work, from
data collection, through the creation of structural models, to finding
biological significance in the results. Some of these tools work together well,
with seamless data transfer and a consistent user interface. Others do not,
often because they have been developed separately, by groups that are part of
different subdisciplines of structural biology, e.g. X-ray crystallography and
nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
Now structural biologists are targeting mesoscale structures including the
macromolecular machinery of the cell. Increasingly often, they combine
different techniques in a single large research project, aiming to create
multiscale models. This raises the challenge to software developers of working
together to create an integrated and extensible toolset that supports a range
of experimental techniques, as well as modelling and simulation methods.
Such a toolset will also allow synergy between researchers beyond planned
collaborations, by ensuring for example that a model that has been deposited in
a public database can easily be reused within an investigation that is based on
complementary techniques.
This workshop will discuss progress towards these goals and challenges along
the way. The workshop is timely as there is now a strong drive for structural
biologists to look beyond their own subdiscipline. The European ESFRI projects,
such as INSTRUCT (http://www.structuralbiology.eu/) and ELIXIR
(http://www.elixir-europe.org/), are encouraging multi-disciplinary approaches,
and there is also a desire to fit individual experimental results into a
systems view of the cell or organism. These scientific drivers must be
supported by a suitable software environment. While this is widely recognised,
there is as yet no coherent effort in this direction.
The problems of working on a multi-disciplinary structural biology project,
using a diverse set of software tools, is well known, but it is not clear how
to address this problem. The workshop will seek to identify the specific areas
where progress can be made, and discuss possible solutions. Questions for
consideration include:
* multi-disciplinary software versus data conversion software to transfer
between stand-alone packages
* the need for standardisation of data formats or ontologies
* validation and comparison of results between different techniques
* ensuring easy availability and user-friendliness of software
____________________________________________
Chris Morris
chris.mor...@stfc.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1925 603689 Fax: +44 (0)1925 603634
Mobile: 07921-717915
Skype: chrishgmorris
http://pims.structuralbiology.eu/
http://www.citeulike.org/blog/chrishmorris
Daresbury Lab, Daresbury, Warrington, UK, WA4 4AD
