The Automated Function Prediction Special Interest Group

About us & Contact

NEW! AFP teams up with the Biosapiens European Network of Excellence for a two day meeting alongside ISMB/ECCB 2008. For more information go to:

http://2008.BioFunctionPrediction.org

The 2006 meeting was held at Atkinson Hall (CalIT2 building) at the campus of the University of California, San Diego. August 30 through September 1st. Nineteen contributed talks, eight keynote speakers, twenty posters, about 100 attendees and three days of sunshine made for a very enjoyable and stimulating meeting.

NEW: Webcasts now available

Sequence and structure genomics have generated a wealth of data. However, extracting meaningful information from genomic data is becoming increasingly difficult. Both the number and the diversity of discovered genes is increasing. This increase means that established annotation methods, such as homology transfer, are annotating less data. In addition, there is a need for annotation which is standardized so that it could be incorported into function annotation on a large scale. Finally, there is a need to assess the quality of the function prediction software which is out there. We probably know the sequence of the target for next generation antibiotics or cancer treatment. We just did not recognize that target for what it is: it is currently annotated as a "domain of unknown function".

The mission of the Automated Function Prediction Special Interest Group (AFP-SIG) is to bring together computational biologists who are dealing with the important problem of gene and gene product function prediction, to share ideas and create collaborations. To that end we organized the first meeting in 2005, and the second in August 2006 This site will also serve as an information source for the latest developments in the field.

The AFP conferences are organized by Adam Godzik's lab at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research, La Jolla CA and by Russ B. Altman's lab at Stanford University.