Biologists for
decades have adopted a reductionist approach to investigate the secret
of life. In recent years however, thanks to the genome sequencing
efforts, new/old disciplines gained prominence with the specific aim of
studying at a global scale biological processes in terms of their
molecular constituents and their functional interactions. This is the
case of Systems Biology, not new in terms of name and definition that
presently takes advantage of new technological developments to
investigate biological processes at cell, organism or communicative
level. Based on high-throughput quantitative measurements, Systems
Biology adopts computational modelling, mathematical, control and
optimization theories with the purpose of reconstructing cellular
systems and their functioning. Even more recently, Synthetic Biology
seeks to engineer complex artificial biological systems starting from
molecular components to investigate natural biological phenomena for a
variety of applications to come. Can Bioinformatics gap the bridge from
molecular to multi-level and integrated modelling and be the link among
Systems and Synthetic Biology?
The Bologna School will focus on the present state of
art of Bioinformatics, from data analysis to their integration and
assessment in relation to problems of Systems and Synthetic Biology.
The main topics that will be explained and debated are:
• Bionformatics
in relation to System and Synthetic Biology
• Genomic networks and their
modelling: the state of the art
• Progress in protein structure
prediction and protein engineering
• Computational methods for Systems
and Synthetic Biology
• Role of Synthetic Biology in the
development of new powerful advanced technologies
The school will cover different sessions:
The
frontiers of Structural and Functional Genomics
Data
integration, knowledge mining and visualization of systems biology data
High
throughput experiments and Data Bases
Modelling
the data: towards a reconstruction of biological systems.
Synthetic
Biology: putting engineering into biology
Each day four lectures and/or demos will be given to the students.
An open forum for discussion on hot topics will be held
during the round table discussion:
"
Bionanotechnologies
and Nanobiotechnologies for Systems
and Synthetic Biology ".
Students may sign up for short oral presentations during
the student's corner.
