O'Really?

Michel Dumontier is visiting Manchester this week, he will be doing a seminar on Monday 11th of May,  here are some details for anyone who is interested in attending:

Title: Increasingly Accurate Representation of Biochemistry

Speaker: Michel Dumontier, dumontierlab.com

Time: 14.00, Monday 11th May 2009
Venue: Atlas 1, Kilburn Building, University of Manchester, number 39 on the Google Campus Map

Abstract: Biochemical ontologies aim to capture and represent biochemical entities and the relations that exist between them in an accurate manner. A fundamental starting point is biochemical identity, but our current approach for generating identifiers is haphazard and consequently integrating data is error-prone. I will discuss plausible structure-based strategies for biochemical identity whether it be at molecular level or some part thereof (e.g. residues, collection of residues, atoms, collection of atoms, functional groups) such that identifiers may be generated in an automatic and curator/database independent manner. With structure-based identifiers in hand, we will be in a position to more accurately capture context-specific biochemical knowledge, such as how a set of residues in a binding site are involved in a chemical reaction including the fact that a key nitrogen atom must first be de-protonated. Thus, our current representation of biochemical knowledge may improve such that manual and automatic methods of biocuration are substantially more accurate.

Update: Slides are now available via SlideShare.

[Creative Commons licensed picture of Michel in action at ISWC 2008 from Tom Heath]

References

1. Michel Dumontier and Natalia Villanueva-Rosales (2009) Towards pharmacogenomics knowledge discovery with the semantic web Briefings in Bioinformatics DOI:10.1093/bib/bbn056
2. Doug Howe et al (2008) Big data: The future of biocuration Nature 455, 47-50 doi:10.1038/455047a