There are few meetings as important to the bioinformatics community as Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), which is celebrating its 25th year at the upcoming event in Prague to be held July 21-25. Organized by the International Society for Computational Biology, ISMB is known for its wide range of presentations, from big-picture keynotes to its targeted “birds of a feather” discussions and much more. We love attending this conference as a way to connect with other bioinformatics geeks and hash out (bad pun fully intended) best practices for computational biology.
This year’s ISMB will be held in conjunction with the European Conference on Computational Biology. Organizers announced 14 communities of special interest (COSIs) that will be running themes throughout the event; examples include structural bioinformatics, visualization of biological data, and bioinformatics education.
Another COSI focuses on methods for understanding the impacts of genetic variation. In the VARI-COSI workshop taking place all day July 24, experts will offer a number of presentations and discussions on relevant topics. Our own Anika Joecker, Director of Clinical Partnering Bioinformatics, will give a talk entitled “The importance of using a most comprehensive knowledgebase for the identification of pathogenic variants in cancer and inherited diseases.” She’ll speak about HGMD as well as the QIAGEN Knowledge Base, which contains hundreds of thousands of manually curated pathogenic variants associated with oncology and inherited disease. The session will include real-world examples showing how scientists have used QIAGEN Clinical Insight Interpret and Ingenuity Variant Analysis to improve diagnosis and treatment for patients.
If you’re attending ISMB this year, enjoy!