As more genomes become sequenced and more genes are located, the identification and characterization of gene functions on a large-scale (i.e. functional genomics) is the great new challenge to the various genome projects. The advent of large-scale "transcriptomic" and "proteomic" technologies, provides a new type of data, as well as new approaches to discover and characterize gene expression patterns and associated regulatory sequence elements. Developing and validating these new approaches is essential to the future of functional genomics.
This announcement solicits papers and referees for a special track on pattern recognition in gene expressions and regulatory sequence elements, to be held on the conference of Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB2000), Hawaii, January 5-9, 2000. Identification and characterization of regulatory cis-elements and trans- factors of a gene is essential for understanding the mechanisms of the control of gene expression, which can further shed light on gene function. On the other hand, classifying genes based on shared or correlated expression patterns is a great help in identifying subtle and elusive common regulatory signals. As massive data continues to flood in from large-scale genome sequencing and transcriptome analyses, the next challenge to computational biologists is to design new methods to take advantage of both in parallel. This is a central issue in functional genomics. Papers addressing any area of pattern recognition in transcriptome and proteome analysis and the identification of regulatory sequence elements are welcome. The emphasis is on new results describing the analyses of actual experimental data. Specifically, we will encourage submission of manuscripts in these areas:
PSB2000 will publish accepted full papers in an archival Proceedings. All contributed papers will be rigorously peer-reviewed by at least three referees. Each accepted full paper will be allocated up to 12 pages in the conference Proceedings. A limited number of papers will be selected for a 30-minute oral presentation to the full assembled conference. Accepted poster abstracts will be distributed at the conference separately from the archival Proceedings. All one page abstracts for posters should be submitted by Nov. 1. Please send electronically (in plain ascii text or as a Microsoft Word file) to: psb@smi.stanford.edu. (after this date, posters will be accepted on a space available basis; space will be limited especially for interactive/computational posters after this date.) Full papers must be submitted before July 19 by email to Russ Altman at altman@smi.stanford.edu. The file formats we accept are: postscript (*.ps), adobe acrobat (*.pdf) and Microsoft Word documents (*.doc). Attached files should be named with the last name of the first author (e.g. altman.ps, altman.pdf, or altman.doc). Hardcopy submissions or unprocessed TEX or LATEX files will be rejected without review. Each paper must be accompanied by a cover letter. The cover letter must state the following:
Submitted papers are limited to twelve (12) pages in our publication format. Please format your paper according to instructions found at ftp://ftp-smi.stanford.edu/pub/altman/psb/. If figures can not be easily resized and placed precisely in the text, then it should be clear that with appropriate modifications, the total manuscript length would be within the page limit. Color pictures can be printed at the expense of the authors. The fee is $500 per page of color pictures, payable at the time of camera ready submission.
Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique, jmc@igs.cnrs-mrs.fr
University, kanehisa@kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Mayo Clinic, danp@sequana.com
University of Colorado, stormo@beagle.colorado.edu
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, mzhang@cshl.org
PSB publishes peer-reviewed full papers in an archival proceedings. Each accepted paper will be allocated 12 pages in the proceedings volume. Paper authors are required to register (and pay) for the conference by the time they submit their camera-ready copy, or the paper will not be published.
PSB papers are strenuously peer reviewed, and must report significant original material. PSB expects to be included in Indicus Medicus, Medline and other indexing services starting this year. All accepted full papers will be indexed just as if they had appeared in a journal. It is too early to assess the impact of a PSB paper quantitatively, but we will take every action we can to improve the visibility and significance of PSB publication.
Authors who do not wish to submit a full paper are welcome to submit one page abstracts, which will be distributed at the meeting separately from the archival proceedings, and are also welcome to display standard or computer-interactive posters.
We have been able to offer partial travel support to many PSB attendees in the past, including most authors of accepted full papers who request support. However, due to our sponsoring agencies' schedules, we are unable to offer travel awards before the registration (and payment) deadlines for authors. We recognize that this is inconvenient, and we are doing our best to rectify the situation. NO ONE IS GUARANTEED TRAVEL SUPPORT. Travel support applications will be available on our web site.