Advances and Challenges in Protein-RNA: Recognition, Regulation and Prediction

The Banff International Research Station will host the "Advances and Challenges in Protein-RNA: Recognition, Regulation and Prediction" workshop from June 7th to June 12th, 2015.

The function of all living organisms depends on the timely and precise regulation of the expression of the genomic information during its development. Disregulation of these processes is observed in many cancers and neurodegenerative diseases. In highly evolved organisms, such as humans, much regulation occurs after the genome is copied into RNA intermediates during transcription. Many genes that code for RNA without being translated into protein are involved in these processes, together with the proteins that associate with them, yet most of these regulatory factors have only been discovered in the last ten years or less, after the sequencing of the human genome. Understanding the molecular mechanisms that underline these forms of regulation of genome expression is critical to understanding fundamental biology and disease progression, and might lead to the discovery of new approaches to interfere with disease progression.

The workshop will bring together experts experimental and computational biologists to share developments in new methods that study these processes at the whole genome level. It will foster new collaborations between experimental and computational biologists and catalyze the development of new and improved technologies and ideas to merge experimental analysis with mathematical and computational techniques to address this major challenge of biology and molecular medicine.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).

BIRS Scientific Director, Nassif Ghoussoub
E-mail: birs-director[@]birs.ca
http://www.birs.ca/~nassif