VISUALIZING BIOLOGICAL DATA VIZBI

The VIZBI workshop was funded by the EMBO and they would now like your feedback before 15 March 2010. Please take the time to fill out the EMBO questionnaire. It is very important that EMBO receives feedback from as many participants as possible, as this information will strongly influence their decision to fund any future VIZBI meetings.

In addition, you are also encouraged to send any comments, suggestions, or criticisms about the workshop directly to VIZBI committee. We can be reached at the following email address:

The winner of the first VIZBI prize goes to Christian Grove (California Institute of Technology, Arcadia, United States of America) for his poster on the Virtual Worm, co-authored with Paul Sternberg – congratulations Christian!

Together with the session chairs, the five images+abstract below have been selected as finalists for the VIZBI prize. The final winner will be announced after Bang Wong’s keynote talk later today.

We are planning to put the VIZBI poster images in Microsoft Silverlight. If anyone at VIZBI has (or would like to have) experience in  Silverlight please contact Jim.

Following a conversation with Steve Pieper, he set up a Wiki and has invited VIZBI participants to use it for sharing their notes on VIZBI. I’m planning to post to it – feel free to join: http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/VIZBI2010. To edit this wiki, you need to create an account (to fight spam) – just be sure to mention you are associated with the VIZBI meeting when you make an account. Thanks Steve!

Over the last six months we have been working with a group of scientists, including the VIZBI speakers and others, to prepare a series of reviews on visualizing biological data. Today these reviews have been published in a supplementary issue of Nature Methods (Volume 7 No 3 ppS1-S68). In addition to five reviews covering visualization of data from systems biology, genomics, 3D macromolecular structures, alignments and phylogenies, and image-data, the supplement also contains a commentary on future visualization. The editors have also written a 1-page forward and 2-page summary of all reviews. Thanks again to Bang Wong for help with the cover image.  We have written the reviews to be understandable to beginners as well as credible to experts. We believe this collection will be a valuable resource for the community of life scientists using visualization as part of their research.

Our primary goal in the VIZBI workshops is to bring together researchers using and developing methods to visualize a broad range of biological data. Our focus is on the visualization of processed and annotated data in their biological context, rather than the processing of raw data, or on experimental visualization techniques.

Having called together this community, we are now providing this blog as a way of staying in contact. We plan to post here announcements related to the VIZBI meeting, e.g., the publication of articles and videos related of the VIZBI talks. We also plan to post information not strictly related to the VIZBI meeting, but of interest to the VIZBI community, e.g., announcements of other similar meetings, news about other significant publications, or  the launch of new web resources related to visualizing biological data.

In addition, we hope that the blog can be used for discussions that help to identify and exploit synergies between visualization in different areas of research. For example – cases for inter-operation, the re-use of methods or concepts, and common conventions in usability.

Thus, we would like to invite you to contact us if you have news, announcements, or topics you would like to add to the VIZBI blog.