Special session on 'Metaheuristics and Structural Biology'

organized by 
Carsten Baldauf (PICB, Shanghai) and 
Daniel Merkle (University of Southern Denmark, Odense)
carsten]_[picb.ac.cn, daniel]_[imada.sdu.dk


Almost all predictive methods in structural biology induce difficult 
optimization problems, protein folding and molecular docking being two 
very prominent examples. Due to the complex nature of these problems, 
often having several objectives, being inherently dynamic, and having 
highly irregular fitness landscapes, metaheuristics are a valuable 
approach to achieve satisfying solutions in an efficient way. From an 
industrial point of view the importance of this research area is obvious. 
In the area of life sciences the approaches satisfy the request for a 
deeper understanding of the underlying biological processes. From a 
metaheuristic point of view it is evident that a thorough analysis of 
the fitness landscapes and a scientifically founded decision for the 
appropriate metaheuristic variants is necessary to gain such results. 
Besides the presentation of recent research results, this special session 
tries to reduce the lack of communication between the communities from 
computer and life sciences involved in these topics. We encourage 
researchers from life sciences and computational sciences to consider 
submitting their recent research results for a successful event, which 
should also deal as a platform for exchange of knowledge and for 
discussion. The topics of this session include but are not limited to:

RNA and protein folding
Structure prediction
Molecular docking
Drug design and lead optimization
Protein-protein docking
Exploration and analysis of fitness landscapes
Conformational search
Parallel implementations
Bioinformatics

'Metaheuristics and Structural Biology' is a special session of 
META'08 in Hammamet, Tunisia.
http://www2.lifl.fr/META08/

Please submit your contributions via the conference website:
http://www2.lifl.fr/META08/submit.html

Questions? Please contact the organizers:
carsten]_[picb.ac.cn & daniel]_[imada.sdu.dk

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