I 1 Highlights from the Fourth International Society for Computational Biology Student Council Symposium at the Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology

In this meeting report we give an overview of the talks and presentations from the Fourth International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Student Council Symposium held as part of the annual Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference in Toronto, Canada. Furthermore, we detail the role of the Student Council (SC) as an international student body in organizing this symposium series in the context of large, international conferences. Introduction: The Student Council (SC) of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a student-led, worldwide network of young researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The ISCB Board of Directors officially approved the SC in July 2004 at the joint European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) and Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference in Glasgow, Scotland. The major aims of the SC are to organize events and facilitate networking opportunities for SC members while nurturing soft skills to complement the normal academic program, such as organizational, teamwork and networking skills. Since its inception, the SC has organized an annual student symposium for the benefit of the student community in the field of computational biology and bioinformatics. This year the 4 ISCB Student Council Symposiumwas held in Toronto on the 18 of July, as a satellite meeting of the Annual International conference ISMB 2008, with the participation of over 100 delegates. The symposium opened with a keynote by ISCB president Burkhard Rost (Columbia University, USA) on “Evolution teaches protein prediction”. Later in the day Mark Gerstein (Yale University, USA) talked on computational proteomics emphasizing the study of protein motions from a database perspective during his lecture. The symposium ended with a closing keynote by Timothy Hughes (University of Toronto, Canada), who gave an overview of the complexity and diversity of the protein-DNA Interactome to the audience, concluding with an impressive array of talks by internationally wellacclaimed scientists. A research and industry partners session provided a chance for students to become familiar with the opportunities outside the academic world. The session included presentation by Louisa Wright (EBI-EMBL), Jong Bhak, (Korean BioInformation Center, KOBIC) and Richard Wintle (The Centre for Applied Genomics, Canada). A panel discussion on “Career Paths in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology” led by Manuel Corpas with the participation of Philip E. Bourne (University of California San Diego, USA), Alfonso Valencia (Spanish National Research Council, Spain), Jong Bhak, (Korean BioInformation Center, KOBIC) and Richard Wintle (The Centre for Applied Genomics, Canada) gave the attendees the opportunity to ask questions about their opinion on different choices for a future in the field, to both people in academic and non-academic sectors. Proceedings: Students were given the chance to present their work during two student presentation sessions, which included a total of nine talks, and a poster session at the end of the symposium. The goal of the proceedings of the symposium is to present a selection of the best abstracts selected from a total of 75 submissions. The abstracts that have been selected for this supplement comprise eight abstracts chosen from oral presentations and a set of six best-ranked abstracts from the posters presented at the symposium during the poster session. Rigorous peer review was carried out by members of the program committee, which comprised of an international group of students and young researchers. All the abstracts selected for the proceedings can be broadly grouped into the following major themes: Protein-protein interactions: Last century has seen a revolution in our understanding of biological sciences due to the availability of several high-throughput technologies generating numerous large-scale data sets, which have provided us with an unprecedented knowledge of biological systems. Proteinprotein interaction networks, which are an outcome of these technological advancements, have proven to be an invaluable tool to mine functional genomics data and to understand protein function. One of the crucial features of these networks is the BioMed Central