************************************************************************* * Call for papers for the Special issue * * * * Life Science Grids for Biomedicine and Bioinformatics * * * * Future Generation Computer System * * Elsevier * * http://www.elsevier.com/inca/publications/misc/lifesciencegrid05.doc * * * ************************************************************************* IMPORTANT DATES Submission for manuscripts: December 15, 2005 Acceptance notification: January 28, 2006 Due date of revised manuscripts: February 28, 2006 Approximate date of publication: Spring, 2006 Purpose of the Special Issue ---------------------------- Omics technologies (genomics - DNA, transcriptomics - RNA, proteomics - protein, metabolomics - metabolite and phenomics �V phenotype, etc.) and medical informatics have changed the arena of life sciences research forever. They allow generation of data at a large-scale, which started with the whole-genome followed by micro-array gene-expression analysis, mass spectrometry of proteins and metabolites, biomedical imaging processing and health care. Omics technologies require substantial paradigm shifts for the way life sciences research is carried out. Biological experiments are relatively expensive, which forces scientists to focus on advanced design for experimentation as part of a whole-chain research approach. Furthermore, the data generally contains information outside the scope of the original experiment. Hence, to maximize scope of experiments, biological data needs to be reusable, shareable and suitable for in-silico experiments. All of this poses high demands on annotation of data and standardization of data formats. Furthermore, the conversion of data into information and knowledge to support scientists answering biological questions, requires advanced analysis methods and tools that enable mining and integrating these complex datasets. The bottlenecks for life sciences have shifted from data generation to data storage, pre-processing, analysis, and interpretation. The current challenge is to remove these bottlenecks by a combination of life sciences and information technology (IT). The effective and efficient management and use of stored data, and in particular the transformation of these data into information and knowledge, is thus a key requirement for success in Life Sciences, as already has been recognized in many others sectors such as industry, science, government. Life Science Grids are based on the integration of emerging technologies such as Grids, Bioinformatics, Web/Grid Services, Workflow, Semantic Web, to support applications and research in different fields of Life Sciences, such as Health Care, Biomedicine, Computational Chemistry. They promise to provide reliable and secure computing infrastructures facilitating the seamless use of distributed datasets, bioinformatics tools and systems, data mining applications, and knowledge, building a so-called Grid Problem Solving Environment (G-PSE), for solving complex problems in Biomedicine and Health Care. The scope of this special issue is to focus on challenge, applications and services in modern Life Science Grid computing environments. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following: - Grid solutions for Life Science applications - Grid infrastructures for bio data analysis - Parallel bio data-intensive applications - Grid infrastructures, middleware and tools for Life Science Grids - Web Services for Life Science Grids - Workflow for Life Science Grids - Semantic Grid for Life Science applications - Bio data analysis and management - Databases and the grid in biomedical field - Data grids for biomedicine and bioinformatics - Data mining of truly large and high-dimensional bio data sets - Security in bio data grids - Biology, Biochemistry and Biomedicine for Grid Environments - Drug Design - Protein Folding - Systems Biology - Genome informatics and phylogeny Guest Editors ------------- Giovanni Aloisio University of Lecce, Italy giovanni.aloisio@unile.it Vincent Breton CNRS/IN2P3, LPC Clermont-Ferrand, France breton@clermont.in2p3.fr Maria Mirto University of Lecce, Italy maria.mirto@unile.it Almerico Murli University of Naples, Italy almerico.murli@dma.unina.it Tony Solomonides University of West of England, UK Tony.Solomonides@uwe.ac.uk Important Dates --------------- Paper submission deadline December 15, 2005 Notification of acceptance January 28, 2006 Camera-ready papers February 28, 2006 Desired publication End of 2006