On the 10-11 of November 2011 our group headed by Roderic Guigo will be organizing a two-day CRG symposium on “Computational Biology of Molecular Sequences” which will bring together renowned Computational Biologists from around the world, including both pioneers in the field, as well as promising young scientists. Presentations, discussions and dialogue during the Symposium will contribute to survey the status of a discipline that, at the intersection of Biology and Computation, will have an enormous impact on the world of the XXIst century.

You may obtain more information on the objectives of the symposium, the current list of confirmed speakers and instructions on how to register by clicking here. The poster of the symposium can be downloaded by clicking here.

A new version of PhylomeDB has been released. With over 400.000 phylogenetic trees, PhylomeDB is currently the major public phylogenetic repository. It contains phylomes from model (Human, Yeast, Drosophila, Arabidopsis), but also alternative models such as the fungal pathogen Candida albicans, or the insects T. castaneum, N. vitripenis  and A. pisum.  New features have been added to the user's front end, including fully interactive tree images and link outs to external information.

Roderic Guigo and former post-Doc Thomas Derrien were involved in a study recently published in the journal Cell that looked into the function of the long noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs). This type of RNA molecule constitutes a large portion of the mammalian transcriptome even though their biological functions remained unclear. This study helped shed light on the role of long ncRNAs. For example it was shown 1) that long ncRNAs activate neighboring protein-coding genes, 2) activating long ncRNAs have a similar behavior to that of enhancer elements and 3) more specifically, the depletion of both genes directly involved in hematopoiesis or its adjacent ncRNA both show similar cellular migration defects.