The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is a world-leading bioinformatics centre providing biological data to the scientific community, with expertise in data storage, analysis and representation.

Applicants should have a PhD in a relevant field and at least one completed year of postdoctoral work that has resulted in significant peer reviewed publications. Work experience and theoretical knowledge in bio- or cheminformatics as well as molecular biology are required.
Project management skills and the ability to supervise and collaborate with other research teams are essential. Fluency in English is mandatory.

An initial contract of 3 years will be offered to the successful candidate. This can be renewed, depending on circumstances at the time of the review.

The closing date for this application is July 25, 2010.

Please consult http://www.embl.de/aboutus/jobs/jobs_embl_ebi_hinxton/2010/w_10_055_ebi/ for the official ad.

To apply, please send a CV (including names and addresses of referees) and covering letter, by email, quoting ref. no. W/10/055/EBI in the subject line, to: applications@ebi.ac.uk.

The EBI

If you are a Spanish national or a spanish resident of other nationality and interested in conducting research as a postdoc in our group here at the EBI, there is now an open EMBL call for Spanish Fellowships with a deadline on 15 June 2010. The Steinbeck group conductions research in Cheminformatics and Metabolism, with a focus on Metabolomics, Natural Products Structure Elucidation and Chemical Ontology.

Spanish nationals and other nationalities resident in Spain are invited to apply for a fellowship to conduct research at EMBL.

The deadline for applications is Tuesday 15 June 2010.

For more information and to apply online please see the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación website. If you consider applying, please get in touch with me via email.

http://www.jcheminf.com/supplements/2/S1

The conference was organized by the Chemistry-Information-Computer (CIC) Division of the German Chemical Society (GDCh), and covered a broad range of topics in cheminformatics and drug discovery, chemical information and databases, molecular modeling, and computational material science and nanotechnology. The supplement was edited by Frank Oellien, Uli Fechner and Thomas Engel from the GDCh-CIC Division.

The program included an overview of the field of Systems Chemistry from Günter von Kiedrowski (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), 6 plenary lectures from Eberhard Voit, Knut Baumann, Thomas Kostka, Anthony Williams, Karl-Heinz Baringhaus, and Christoph Sotriffer, 17 general lectures, and 54 poster presentations.

If you or any colleagues are organizing a conference or symposium, and would like to publish a supplement of papers in the Journal of Cheminformatics, please let me know.  Also, we can publish Thematic Issues of papers in topical subject areas.  All feedback (and papers) gratefully received!

There will be an exciting line-up of speakers, including Peter Ertl from Novartis speaking about ‘Natural Products’, and several intensive discussion sessions during which you will be given the opportunity to influence the future evolution of the ChEBI project. We will also provide training on ChEBI including using ChEBI for research purposes and submitting your chemicals to ChEBI for annotation.

Information about the workshop, including the full provisional schedule and the link for registration, is available at www.ebi.ac.uk/training/onsite/CHEBI_230610.html.

We hope to welcome you to Hinxton in June.

Kind regards,

the ChEBI team.

CDK-Taverna workflow

We are glad to announce that our article about CDK-Taverna, an open workflow solution for cheminformatics, is now online on BMC Bioinformatics. CDK-Taverna, which lives at http://www.cdk-taverna.de/, features more than 160 workers for various tasks in molecular informatics.

The workflow paradigm allows scientists to flexibly create generic workflows using different kinds of data sources, filters and algorithms, which can later be adapted to changing needs. In order to achieve this, library methods are encapsulated in Lego(TM)-like building blocks which can be manipulated with a mouse or any pointing device in a graphical environment, relieving the scientist from the need to learn a programming language. Building blocks, so-called workers, are connected by data pipelines to enable data flow between them, which is why pipelining is often used interchangeably for workflow.

Picture of Eric taken by Jerone2

Sitting at a lunch table somewhere close to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, people around me are discussing crowdsourcing and why people are contributing to open source projects. Some of them never read Eric Raymond and I’m taking the opportunity to point to open versions of his seminal books: The Cathedral and the Bazaar,  The Magic Cauldron and particularly Homesteading the Noosphere, where he discusses the mechanics of the open source movement. Essential reading for everybody interested in open source, open data, open standards and open access. The articles have been published as a very nice book by O’Reilly.

Therapeutic Applications of Computational Biology and Chemistry: TACBAC 2010

1st March – 3rd March 2010

Wellcome Trust Conference Centre, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK

With the US National Institute of Health’s Molecular Library Initiative and the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute’s chemogenomics and cheminformatics programmes, large-scale drug discovery and biological screening data have entered the public domain. We are also witnessing the first efforts to sequence individual human genomes, and are making impressive progress in understanding the genomes of some of the world’s most significant disease-causing organisms. Integration of genomic sequence information with proteomics and metabolomics data provides an unprecedented chance to systematically attack disease on a molecular level. Open access to bioinformatics and cheminformatics data also opens up exciting new opportunities for academic–industrial collaboration. TACBAC 2010 will bring together experts from both the biomedical and the computational domains to explore these novel developments, discuss how to overcome the major challenges, and create new opportunities for applying computational biology and chemistry to disease management and prevention.

Further Information, draft programme & Registration:

http://registration.hinxton.wellcome.ac.uk/display_info.asp?id=177

Abstract deadline: 11^th January 2010

Registration closes: 18^th January 2010

The application procedure is outlined at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/training/Studentships/

The deadlines are:
Registration deadline 01 December 2009
Application deadline 15 December 2009

We are looking forward to receiving your application.

Christoph Steinbeck and John Overington

non-chem doodle by Dan Paluska

Colleague Noel O’Boyle has already reported it: There is now an open collection of javascript-based chemistry components for the web, called ChemDoodle, released under GPL license by iChemLabs, inc. The stuff looks really neat.

The collection comprises viewers, an editor, a look-up component (try entering accession numbers such as “1″, “2″ or “3″ (you get the point?)) and more. The interesting part is that no java applet needs to be loaded and things are supported by the browser directly. This does not mean that they didn’t have to go through a hell of compatibility testing.