We propose to organize a workshop entitled """"""""Regulatory and functional RNAs: computational, genomic, and structural approaches"""""""". The workshop will take place from July 27th to August 8th, 2003 in Benasque, Huesca, Spain. The workshop will have a strong focus on computational methods for the discovery and analysis of functional and regulatory RNAs in whole-genome analyses. The main goal of this workshop is to bring together the leaders in the field of RNA informatics in order to identify significant new tools, methods and algorithms that will shape the field in the near future. The expected participants will be mostly computational biologists who have already shown significant contributions in RNA bioinformatics. The primary topics of discussion will be: (1) Computational methods for the discovery of novel RNA genes and tools for the systematic genomic annotation of RNA genes. (2) Algorithms for the prediction of two and three dimensional RNA structures. Inference of RNA function. (3) RNA structural alignments and homology searches. How to improve RNA similarity searches by taking into account the structure as well as the sequence information.
