We intend to organize a workshop entitled """"""""Computational approaches to noncoding RNAs"""""""". The workshop will take place from July 16th to July 28th, 2006 at the Benasque Center for Sciences, Benasque, Spain. The workshop will have a strong focus on computational methods for the discovery and characterization of functional and regulatory RNAs. ? ? The main goal of this workshop is to bring together the leaders in the field of RNA informatics. The ? participants will be mostly computational biologists which have already shown significant contributions in RNA bioinformatics. We will discuss the needs of the field, and will identify the new methods and algorithms that will shape the field in the near future. The workshop will be oriented towards performing actual research on the site. ? ? The main topics of discussion will be: (1) Algorithms for the prediction of two and three dimensional RNA structures. Inference of RNA function. (2) Computational methods for the discovery of novel RNA genes and tools for the systematic genomic annotation of RNA genes. (3) RNA structural alignments. (4) RNA homology searches. How to improve RNA similarity searches by taking into account the structure as well as the sequence information. (5) RNA-based phylogenetic methods. (6) ncRNA families and RNA databases. ? ?
