Abstract:

These proceedings contain the texts that were delivered by invited speakers at the contactforum Mathematics and genomics that was held at the Academy House in Brussels on October 18, 2003. Genomics provides the most direct approach to the study of new species. Genomic series as such already contain an incredible amount of data that refer to the state and the development of the species. Moreover, thanks to genomics, information became available that would never have been into reach by classical biological techniques. Genomics gives rise to a marvelously wide range of advanced mathematical techniques. The organizers hope that this contact forum has supported and/or introduced the scientific activities going on in the area of genomics. This conference was only possible thanks to the, Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, the Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, and the Scientific Research Network ‘Advanced Numerical Methods for Mathematical Modeling’ (FWO Vlaanderen). The organization was a joint initiative of the Belgian Mathematical Society and the National Committee for Mathematics. The five invited talks covered a wide range of different topics in this new and exciting field where scientists from different fields such as statistics, informatics, biology, mathematics, etc., all join efforts for a better understanding of the genome. The speakers are leading experts and succeeded in bringing a large audience to Brussels on a Saturday. About 60 participants from Mathematics, Informatics, Biology, and Medicine made this a successful day. This was the programme: * David Balding (Imperial College, London) : Inferring haplotypes from genotypes * Alessandra Carbone (Univ. Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris): Codon bias and the space of microorganisms * Bart De Moor (K.U.Leuven): Bioinformatics: Organisms from Venus, Technology from Jupiter, Algorithms from Mars * David Rand (Univ. of Warwick): Design principles behind complex circadian clocks * Shoshana J. Wodak (Univ. Libre de Bruxelles): Bridging the molecular and systems level views in the post-genomic era: Role of bioinformatics