The Ninth Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC2011)

Abstract

The Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC) is a leading conference in the Bioinformatics community and has grown rapidly since its inception in 2003. The goal of the annual conference series is to enable high quality interaction on bioinformatics research. The past APBC conferences were held in: 1. APBC2003 4-7 Feb 2003: Adelaide Australia 2. APBC2004 18-22 Jan 2004: Dunedin, New Zealand 3. APBC2005 17-21 Jan 2005: Singapore 4. APBC2006 13-16 Feb, 2006: Taipei Taiwan 5. APBC2007 15-17 Jan, 2007: Hong Kong 6. APBC2008 14-17 Jan, 2008: Kyoto Japan 7. APBC2009 13-16 Jan, 2009: Beijing China 8. APBC2010 18-21 Jan, 2010: Bangalore India The Ninth Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC2011) was held in Incheon, South Korea, the first time in this dynamic country. The conference spanning the dates of the 11 to the 14 of January brought together more than 300 researchers, professional, industry leaders and students from all over the globe. The participants came from institutions in the following 19 countries and regions (in alphabetical order): Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, UK and USA. The conference program included 6 keynote speakers (Drs. Steven Jones, Luonan Chen, Peer Bork, Sang Yup Lee, Hong Gil Nam and Kenta Nakai), 55 selected talks, 8 tutorials and more than 118 posters. The titles of the keynote talks are: • Steven Jones, “Bioinformatics and Cancer Genomics” • Luonan Chen, “Modeling and Analyzing Nonlinear Biomolecular Networks” • Peer Bork, “Systemic analysis of the human gut: connecting chemicals, proteins, cells, communities and phenotypes” • Sang Yup Lee, “Systems metabolic engineering” • Hong Gil Nam, “Understanding and controlling plant growth and development: Genetic, Systems, and chemical genomic approaches” • Kenta Nakai, “Information for Transcriptional Regulation” The tutorial topics for APBC2011 included WebLab: a web-based bioinformatics platform (Jingchu Luo), Promenade through the web programming for biological research using Perl language (Kyung-Hoon Kwon), Bioinformatics analysis of genome & exome by next generation sequencing (Namshim Kim), Probabilistic Models for Multiple Motif Discovery (Jong Kyoung), Molecular Modeling: Analysis of Protein Structure and Function (Jinhyuk Lee), OASIS: Traditional Korean Medicine Information Portal (Sang-Jun Yea), Information Retrieval and Text Mining Opportunities in Bioinformatics (Jeyakumar Natarajan) and Bioworks: Bioinformation Analysis Pipeline (Seungyoon Nam and Youngmahn Hahn). The emphasis of APBC has been algorithmic development and innovation in Bioinformatics and this year that theme continued. Reflecting the ever-changing nature of Bioinformatics and is adaption to advances in technology, for the first time, a session was held on next-generation sequencing. A wide range of topics in Bioinformatics were covered at the conference and were categorised as: • Phylogenetics and Evolution • Molecular binding and modelling • Genome Sequencing and Assembly • Network and system biology • Structural Bioinformatics • Pathway analysis • Proteomics * Correspondence: Phoebe.Chen@latrobe.edu.au La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Chen and Cho BMC Bioinformatics 2011, 12(Suppl 1):I1 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/12/S1/I1