Courtesy of Andres Rueda, Flickr

There are still places available at the 2012 conference on Therapeutic Applications of Computational Biology and Chemistry (TACBAC), 12-14 March 2012, at the Wellcome Trust Conference Centre, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK

This conference will bring together leading researchers investigating computational chemistry and biology techniques as applied to advancing our ability to predict, diagnose and modulate human disease. This broad and multidisciplinary meeting will explore the major challenges in drug discovery and development where innovation in computational approaches and tools can really make a significant and tangible contribution towards novel treatments.  You should attend this conference if you are a researcher interested in drug discovery, or developing or using computational approaches to the development of therapeutics, or if you are a key decision maker in a pharmaceutical or biotechnology company.

Each of the sessions, which progress from identifying disease mechanisms to implementing new therapeutic and diagnostic approaches in the clinic, will bring together experts in both the biomedical and the computational aspects of the topic under discussion. Sessions chairs will encourage discussion and contribution from the attendees.

Session topics
• Clinical implications of individual genomes
• Metabolism and biomarkers
• Computational systems biology
• Discovery of chemical probes
• Modelling xenobiotic metabolism

Registration and submission of abstracts is open now.

Courtesy of GreenNeticen

What does it mean to live a good life? Philosophers have written about this questions for thousands of years, and very often we find surprisingly up-to-date answers and suggestions in texts as old as 2000 years. Sadly, most of the people in our hectic western societies (and the more and more hectic eastern societies and ….) feel that their life is getting out of hand and they grave for answers but ironically feel that they have no time to retreat and read those timeless pieces of advice. On the other hand, there is a rich corpus of new literature and online media dealing with these questions.

I have spent countless hours in the past 15 years thinking and reading and acting about this problem of what it means to live a good life. I’m certainly influenced by humanist ideas and some eastern philosophical streams. I feel that “Mens sana in corpora sana” is a good starting point for thinking about good life. Then, everybody has to define for him or herself, what that exactly translates into.
In this and a couple of following blog items I will try to report on my portfolio of thoughts, sources and solutions

As scientist, we can’t help but being a scientist 24/7. Simply by definition. We are driven by curiosity and encapsulated in an incredibly dynamically moving field. The scientific endeavour doesn’t start at 9 am and ends at 5pm. No way we could stop thinking and working after and before the end or start of a regular work day.  That makes is even more important to create islands of leisure and to indulge in good reading, arts, music, physical practice, being with loved ones and friends.
And the good news is: All of this will make us better at our core profession. We all know that many of our best ideas come at unexpected times and at unexpected places. My wife, a psychiatrist, likes to say: “Don’t disturb your brain while it is doing its job”.

In the September 1st issue of NATURE, you can find two articles that very nicely layout the problem: On page 20, Heidi Ledford  writes about “The 24/7 Lab”, subtitle “Working weekends, leaving at midnight, Friday evening meetings, does science come out the winner?”. She describes one of those restless 24/7 labs led by a scientist who demands late night hours and working over christmas from his staff and who sometimes regrets a bit that he sees his children so rarely. But he drives them to swimming lessons (while he does that, he is efficient by having phone calls with lab members). I have met a number of colleagues over the years who work like this and who were quite intolerant against other scientific lifestyles. An obvious thing to observe is that at least in earlier days, these people lived those demanding lifes on the back of others, such as their partners who stay at home, look after the children and do the household.  Now, don’t get me wrong: I firmly believe that everybody should live the life of their choice, as long as it is concious and doesn’t hurt anyone.

Then again, on page 27, Julie Overbaugh, a team leader in the Division of Human Biology, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, thinks that ’24/7 isn’t the only way: A healthy work–life balance can enhance research’, and I couldn’t agree more. She delivers an extremely well-balanced opinion, including a paragraph where she says: “To be a successful scientist there are times when it is important to pull out all the stops — when a big grant deadline is looming or a high-impact paper is wrapping up. Sometimes, when we are competing with other labs on an exciting story, I briefly imagine locking everyone in the lab to try to push for results more quickly.” And this is actually very fulfilling, if you know that times of retreat and re-energizing will follow. The most enlightening exercise here is indeed to look back at the life of many successful scientists in the past (just think ‘pre-internet times’), who where not constantly connected, burdened by administration, applying for research money and frantically jetting around the world. There it turns out that more time to think, less communication and long stretches of isolation are very beneficial for fostering intellectual achievements. As a starting point you might watch David Levy’s talk entitled ‘No time to think’ at Google. It is worth-it just for Meng’s introduction

I’m going to stop here. This post was mainly to alert you of these two articles. I had it sitting on my hard disks and now my phd student John May put the article on the table again.

But let me say one last thing: Do not let others dictate how you live your life. Very often they are completely disqualified to do that. An old bon mot says that, on their death bed, very few people regret that they didn’t spend enough time in the office.

Courtesy of Andres Rueda, Flickr

I’m co-organizing the 2012 conference on Therapeutic Applications of Computational Biology and Chemistry (TACBAC), 12-14 March 2012, at the Wellcome Trust Conference Centre, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK

This conference will bring together leading researchers investigating computational chemistry and biology techniques as applied to advancing our ability to predict, diagnose and modulate human disease. This broad and multidisciplinary meeting will explore the major challenges in drug discovery and development where innovation in computational approaches and tools can really make a significant and tangible contribution towards novel treatments.  You should attend this conference if you are a researcher interested in drug discovery, or developing or using computational approaches to the development of therapeutics, or if you are a key decision maker in a pharmaceutical or biotechnology company.

Each of the sessions, which progress from identifying disease mechanisms to implementing new therapeutic and diagnostic approaches in the clinic, will bring together experts in both the biomedical and the computational aspects of the topic under discussion. Sessions chairs will encourage discussion and contribution from the attendees.

Session topics
• Clinical implications of individual genomes
• Metabolism and biomarkers
• Computational systems biology
• Discovery of chemical probes
• Modelling xenobiotic metabolism

Registration and submission of abstracts is open now.

More here.

Image courtesy of Readerwalker

As the eruption under the Eyjaflalla glacier in Iceland kept me on the ground yesterday, together with half a million other people in Europe, and I found myself confronted with the question of what to do with another evening in Cambridge. So I decided to give the Oak Bistro a try which is just a two-minutes walk from where I live but which so far had slipped my attention. The Bistro is located in a historic coaching inn at the corner of Regent Street and Lensfield Road. People sitting at one of the few tables in the front room can observe the busy life at the crossing. As an elderly lady with a hearing problem kept shouting at her company, I decided to take a table in the back of the bistro. The Oak features an eclectic menu with hints to a number of international cuisines. I started with some Shetland scallops which still had their coral attached, placed on a bed of a very nice, light, citric green salsa, accompanied by a Viognier Altas Cumbres Lujan de Cuyo from Argentina from 2008, a relatively light and crispy white wine. For main course, I choose to go for the wild mushroom risotto, which was good. The chef ignored my resentment against truffle oil but luckily used it very sparingly.With it, I had a Broken Rock Chenin Blanc from Coastal South Africa, again  2008. It held what the wine list promised.

I finished with a selection of cheeses, which was a mistake (three relatively large pieces of relatively boring cheeses), only to have reason to drink one of their desert whines, followed by a glass of Armagnac and Espresso.  Overall, it was a very delightful evening with good food and the Oak’s friendly and attentive staff.

Did I make my way home? Yes, I was able to get one of the few remaining Eurostar Tickets for the next day and took the train from London St. Pancras home to the Black Forest. Breakfast in London, lunch in Paris, dinner with your loved ones at home in south-west Germany. Life could be worse.

So, while Steinblog was about my scientific life and event or news related to it, my travel blog reported about two other aspects, the need to travel a lot and the better and less good places that I encounter as well as my passion for good food (liquid and solid) and the places where you get it. I called this travel blog “Reports from a quest for quality and silence” because that’s what it is. And quality and silence is hard to find.

A short while ago I stayed at the Marriott Metro Center in Washington during the 2009 ACS Fall National Meeting. The first night was good, the room is nice and reasonably quiet, as requested. My satisfaction received a first hit when I tried to have breakfast the morning after and, after being seated, found myself  between two competing sources of loud music, one from the lobby and one from the bar in the breakfast restaurant. So much for my quest for silence The local starbucks did a much better job, so I had breakfast there. Overall, the Marriott Metro Center gets a good rating:

Location: 8/10, two blocks away from the conference center, $50 by taxi from the airport.

Room: 7/10 Could be bigger but well fitted with everything you need. Nice wide LCD TV. Internet for $12 a day.

Lobby and Chill-out areas: 5/10. Lobby area is too small, as is the seating area with too few sofas and chairs.

Breakfast: 3/10 See above. Couldn’t really test it but even without the music the place feels a bit like eating in the middle of a highway.

Room Service and Laundry: 8/10, Fast, reliable.

Concierge: 8/10 Very friendly and professional.

Gym: 9/10, well equipped, spacey, every machine you need, yoga mats available.

Overall, my impression was more like 7/10.

In Goslar's old town ((c) Philipp Andre)

There are a few seats left for the 5th German Conference on Cheminformatics in Goslar and we’ll extend the deadline a bit to give you the chance to register if you haven’t done so.

The GCC is a great chance to meet with around 200 other participants from all areas of life science informatics and listen to talks about the latest research in the field. This year we have an exciting collection of keynote speakers with topics ranging from modelling of biological systems and systems chemistry via computer-aided material design to the latest developments in ChemSpider.

The program is complemented by 60 posters and again prices will be awarded for the three best posters.

Goslar itself is a wonderful place to visit, with its two UNESCO world heritage sites, the old town centre and the ore mine.

We are looking forward to meeting you in Goslar. Registration is still open.

We now invite papers for our symposium on computational aspects of Metabolomics at the 239th National Meeting
of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in San Francisco next spring.

Metabolomics studies the occurrence and change of concentrations of small molecular weight chemical compounds (metabolites) in organisms, organs, tissues, cells and ultimately cell compartments in the context of environmental changes, disease or other boundary conditions. It does this by means of spectroscopic and chromatographic techniques and by observing at once not only a few but all compounds visible to the particular technique used. As such, it is a field at the boundary between chemistry and biology, helping to answer biological questions using analytical chemistry and cheminformatics techniques.

The metabolomics symposium at the 239th ACS national meeting in San Francisco invites submissions of talks about computing, informatics as well as chemical information aspects of metabolomics. Topics could include the analysis of metabolomics experiments, metabolomics databases, computer-assisted structure elucidation of metabolites and more. Abstracts may be submitted via http://abstracts.acs.org. You’ll find the metabolomics session as part of the CINF division symposiums. Deadline is October 19, 2009. In case of questions, please email Christoph Steinbeck at steinbeck@ebi.ac.uk.

Welcome to our new team members

I’m glad to announce that the recent round of recruitment for the ChEBI team has been completed. We have two new colleagues,  Steve Turner, our new Chemistry Curator, and Adriano Dekker, our new Software Engineer. Both will work with us to make ChEBI fit for the inclusion of more then 500.000 new ChEBI entries. Those chemical structure were brought to EBI by my esteemed colleague John Overington as part of the ChEMBL database, formerly known as Starlite, Candistore and Drugstore. ChEMBL obviously contains much more than chemical structure, namely their activities against around 4000 biological targets and other properties, and the ChEMBL resource will be manage by John and his team. ChEBI will provide the chemical structure, substructure and similarity searching for the ChEMBL structures and we will soon report on our recent advancements in this field.

For now, I wish Steve and Adriano a good start in my team. I’m sure we are going to have a good time together.

The workshop itself was phantastic – we had 40 participants with well balanced contributions from industry and academia. The first half day was dedicated to tutorials on various aspects of CDK, basic installation, our CDK and Oracle-based chemical search engine, scripting of CDK from within Bioclipse and CDK-based workflows in KNIME. The second day brought talks about science and applications based on CDK by John van Drie, Asad Rahman und Oliver Karch.  I reported earlier on those talks.

This official part was followed by a developers workshop in the format of an unconference.  Participants suggested topics on the fly and then voted with their feet. The topics that then made it where:

• Clojure
• Mining ChEMBL with CDK pharmacophore stuff
• Threading group
• Top 10 improvements (CDK WS 2009 unconference)
• JChemPaint/Rendering

all of which reported their results on the CDK wiki.

Another important outcome was a movement to join forces in creating and maintaining joint CDK-based plugins for KNIME and Bioclipse. There is a lot of synergy to be harvested. Licensing problems will need to be overcome but that seems doable.

A nice thing about molwind is that is they have open-sourced it. It lives at molwind.org