Written by Simon Garnier on May 11, 2010 – 5:51 pm

On June 7-9, 2010, the MIBS project (Modeling and Information Processing for Systems Biology) organizes a workshop on "Modeling complex dynamics in biological systems". MIBS is an interdisciplinary project involving all academic and research institutions of the Toulouse area (France), with the goal of promoting and developing a strong and wide expertise on systems biology in Toulouse.

Systems biology aims at understanding how biological systems operate at various scales, by studying the interactions between the individual constituents (genes, proteins, cells, organisms). At each of these organisational levels, the degree of complexity is such that information cannot be processed and integrated on a purely intuitive basis. For this reason, mathematical models play an increasingly important role. Such models must be elaborated on the bases of biological data and validated at both the elementary constituent and the global structure scales. Nowadays, the development of statistical analysis and mathematical modeling tools leads to the possibility of 'in silico' simulations of the various processes which underlie the operation of the biological systems at the various scales.

The use of these methods and the new investigation areas that they open are constantly growing. The goal of this workshop is to gather experts of this new interdisciplinary research field in an attempt to draw a sketch of the state-of-the-art and to spread the methodologies to a wide community of researchers.

The workshop will consist of plenary talks of 45 minutes each plus 15 minutes for questions. The schedule will leave time slots for discussions and interactions among the participants. The participation to the workshop is free of charge, but registration in mandatory.

The workshop will be followed by a one-day companion workshop, 'Mathematics of Complex Systems', on Thursday June 10, 2010.

All necessary information to attend the workshop are available at this address: http://sites.google.com/site/mibs3toulouse/workshops.