The Systems Biology: Global Regulation of Gene Expression Conference will be held March 23-26, 2006, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The meeting will focus on unraveling the regulatory information that controls gene expression on a global scale. It is clear that effective collaborations between experimental and computational biologists will be required to grapple with this complex problem. Thus the meeting has been designed to permit a free cross-disciplinary exchange of existing ideas and expertise. It is hoped that this meeting will provide a mechanism for the establishment of new collaborations, and a forum for discussing new experimental and computational approaches. The discussion topics include computational approaches to identifying cis-regulatory elements, advances in detection of protein/DNA interactions in living cells, transcriptional and posttranscriptional network modeling, comparative genomics of global gene regulation, and emerging technologies and concepts in systems biology. Each of the five sessions will specifically address genome-wide approaches, either experimental or computational. In addition, there will be a pre-conference workshop to provide hands-on experience with some of the computational approaches, and to provide background molecular biology information for the bioinformaticists and background bioinformatics information for the molecular biologists.
