Friday
The National Center for Biomedical Computing at Columbia University, in collaboration with the IBM Computational Biology Center, are starting a new initiative to create a yearly workshop and database for the assessment of methods for reverse engineering of biological circuits. The DREAM workshop is intended to provide a forum for researchers to discuss a framework for the evaluation of experimental and computational tools used to reverse engineering biological pathways. The first workshop of this series will be held in New York on September 7-8, 2006. The workshop will address issues related to the identification of gold standards that could be used to test the accuracy of methods for reverse engineering of transcriptional, signaling metabolic and developmental networks. These gold standards could be either in-silico models of biochemical interactions or known biological pathways. Additionally, the workshop will foster dialogue on the advantage and disadvantage of the use of different types of high-throughput data for the task of reverse engineering and on the issue of biochemical validation of inferred interactions. Finally, the workshop will focus on experimental designs, theoretical frameworks and computational algorithms for pathway inference, as well as on the definition of appropriate metrics for the evaluation of the quality of the predictions of reverse engineering methods.