Description

DESCRIPTION OF THE EVENT

JOBIM is the French speaking reference bioinformatics conference. It offer the possibility of the entire french community, and also a part of Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec and Maghreb community to exchange together. JOBIM is an international conference, with a large proportion of presentations in English with prestigious international guests speakers. Therefore JOBIM has a unique place in the scientific landscape. The first JOBIM was organized in Montpellier in 2000. It had played a significant role in the structuration of the french bioinformatics community. Ten years later, JOBIM was also organized in Montpellier and was a very positive symbol for the whole community, bringing together its actors coming from different horizonsas mathematics, informatics and biology. Reorganized JOBIM in Montpellier for its twenty years will be a new occasion to make an impression. Indeed, Montpellier is a stronghold of bioinformatics, with applications on different scopes: health, environment, ecology or agronomy. All these disciplines are undergoing profound changes, with a massive influx of data, the necessary use of mathematical models and efficient computing methods. In this context, the regional scientific community is particulary concerned. This congress is a direct extension of its recent actions for the development of interdisciplinarity between mathematics, informatics, biology, health and environment. This will make it possible to mobilize the Montpellier community (see already the strong participation in the organizing committee), and to show to a large panel of national and international scientists the achievements, teams, laboratories and infrastructures of Montpellier.

SCIENTIFIC INTEREST OF THE EVENT

Large-scale biology is the source of a considerable amount of data concerning all levels of life:

• genes, proteins and their interactions, omics data, their dynamics and their evolution;
• the cells, their organization and molecular mechanisms;
• organs and their functioning, organisms and their physiology;
• species and populations, ecological systems and their evolution.

The exploitation of this data is at the heart of JOBIM. It requires both models representing the complex laws of life, and computer work, to simulate or estimate these models, data mining, and to integrate all these heterogeneous sources of information into databases and knowledge bases. The objective is a better understanding of living organisms, with challenges in all fields, environmental, agronomic, medical and pharmaceutical. These interface works have grown in an extraordinary way in recent years (the most cited articles today, all sciences combined, are related to the computer exploitation of omics data). This trend is currently continuing, due in particular to the acceleration of high-throughput data acquisition technologies. This considerable acceleration makes it possible today to carry out studies that were unthinkable only a few years ago. One example is the "1000 human genomes" project, completed in two years, whereas the sequencing of the first human genome took about 15 years. Through these data, the scientific community has an almost inexhaustible source of information, which makes it possible to answer many questions, such as the origin and migration of human populations, or the predisposition to genetic and non-genetic diseases. This example among many others shows clearly that biology is undergoing a revolution, with the rise of "dry" biologists, modeletisers and/or bioinformaticians, in collaboration with "wet" biologists working at the lab. JOBIM's objective is to promote this multidisciplinary research, by highlighting innovative methodological work and answering important biological questions.