New scientific approaches to advance human genome sequencing

13/04/2011

A group of some 50 experts from around the world will meet on 5, 6 and 7 April for the Sequence, Mapping and Assembly Assessment Project dnGASP/RGASP3 Workshop, a bioinformatics competition to select the best tools for genome sequencing, mapping and assembly, and for reading alignment data using a second-generation sequence. The Workshop will be held at the Museu Colet, in Barcelona.

This is the first scientific meeting of its kind ever to be held in Spain, whereby ideas are evaluated in the form of a competition. The contestants were chosen based on their submitted proposals for a genomic analysis solution to a problem devised by the Workshop’s scientific committee. For three days, the participating research groups will present their proposed solutions to the problem, discussing sequencing systems and algorithms to decide on the best methods and to identify multi-disciplinary teams that can tackle human genome research from different perspectives.

The Workshop has been organized by the International Center for Scientific Debate (ICSD), a Biocat initiative sponsored by “la Caixa” Foundation, as well as by the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), and the National Genome Analysis Center (CNAG). The event falls within the framework of the ENCODE international consortium, one of the most important projects of the National Human Genome Research Institute whose mission is to identify all of the functional elements in the human genome sequence.