Dear colleagues

Modern molecular and systems biology approaches greatly increased opportunities of agricultural biotechnology in the development of new highly productive and stress-resistant varieties as well as a new techniques in food industry. To succeed, systems biology must be a collaborative and cross-disciplinary endeavor. The synergy between the different areas of expertise and specialists from different countries should empower a new integrative and interdisciplinary approach to biological research. The bioinformatics plays an important role in solving these tasks. It provides a basis for biological data storage, analysis and modeling. The progress in bioinformatics during last years resulted in a large amount of methods that can be used successfully in biology, such as genome functional annotation, gene networks analysis and modeling, tissue and organs development modeling. The results of French and Russian researchers in the bioinformatics acknowledged worldwide. Teams from Russia have developed methods for prediction of regulatory sites and promoters, DNA, RNA sequence and structure analysis, genetic network analysis and modeling. INRA ranked the number one agricultural institute in Europe and number two in the world. Researchers from INRA have important results in the databases in plant genomics, genome re-annotation, computational analysis of non-coding DNA, bacterial genomics, protein structure modeling, animal genetics, systems biology. The mutual collaboration between them will be beneficial. The Joint Russian-French Workshop “Genomics, Bioinformatics and Life Science Modeling” will cover the main bioinformatics areas from database handling and genome annotation to genetic networks analysis and modeling. The topics of the seminar are the following:

• computational genomics;
• prediction of regulatory sequences in DNA;
• genome annotation and re-annotation using modern computational approaches;
• computational systems biology;
• novel experimental techniques in genomic analysis;
• the knowledge-based data- and text- mining approaches for analysis of biological systems;
• genetic networks analysis and modeling;
• computational modeling of tissue and organ development in plants;
• application of the image processing and analysis in biology.

The program will include oral presentations of the latest research results (18th-19th June, 2010), round table discussions, and visits to the local research labs (20th-21st June, 2010).