News/ISMB 2013: Automated Function Prediction
Those of you attending ISMB may be interested in the Automated Function Prediction special interest group. The following comes from Iddo Friedberg, co-chair, on behalf of the AFP 2013 organizing committee:
The Automated Function Prediction, an ISMB 2013 Special Interest Group meeting.
Key Dates:
- April 20, 2013: Deadline for submitting extended abstracts posters & talks
- May 9, 2013: Notifications for accepted abstracts e-mailed to corresponding authors
- May 16, 2012: Deadline for presenters to confirm acceptance of invitation to speak.
- July 20, 2013: AFP SIG preceding ISMB/ECCB 2013, Berlin
Sequence and structure genomics have generated a wealth of data, but extracting meaningful information from genomic information is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge. Both the number and the diversity of discovered sequences are increasing, and the fraction of genes whose function is known is decreasing. In addition, there is a need for annotation which is standardized so that it could be incorporated into function annotation on a large scale. Finally, there is a need to assess the quality of the available function prediction software.
For these reasons and many more, automated protein function prediction is rapidly gaining interest among computational biologists in academia and industry.
The Automated Function Prediction Special Interest Group (AFP SIG) has been part of ISMB since 2005. We call upon all researchers involved in gene and protein function prediction and annotation, both computational and experimental, to submit an abstract to the AFP meeting. Authors of select abstracts will be invited to give a talk and/or present a poster. We will also be discussing the upcoming second Critical Assessment of Function Annotations, or CAFA. CAFA 1 was a highly successful experiment, engaging 30 groups worldwide, and has resulted in 16 peer-reviewed papers in Nature Methods and BMC Bioinformatics:
- http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v10/n3/full/nmeth.2340.html
- http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcbioinformatics/supplements/14/S3
We are looking forward to a new and expanded CAFA 2 in 2013-2014, which will include a cellular component prediction track, and a human-specific track.
Keynote speakers:
- Patricia Babbitt, University of California, San Francisco
- Alex Bateman, European Bioinformatics Insitute
- Anna Tramontano, "La Sapienza" Universtiy, Rome.
For further instructions on AFP 2013, please see BioFunctionPrediction.org.
Contact: afp.cafa.2013@gmail.com.
