New algorithms in macromolecular crystallography and electron microscopy

Motivation

Detailed three dimensional information of macromolecules is often crucial to the study of biological systems. Structural data have been used to elucidate the basis of diseases resulting from variant forms of proteins and design drugs to inhibit molecules involved in diseases. Through developing new computational methods, accurate three dimensional structures can be determined more efficiently and when current methods fail.

Recent advances in computational power have opened new possibilities in structural biology. Thus, it is timely to bring together specialists to exploit the technology for maximum benefit and propose new methods that envision future gains in processing power. There are only a few groups world wide involved in computational methods development in structural biology, but novel and powerful algorithms have a major impact on the whole field. For example, there are more than 15 000 citations from computational methods papers by five invited speakers who have already expressed an interest in attending the workshop.

Purpose

Computationally demanding algorithms will be presented and novel algorithms that would require a hundred fold increase in computational power will be discussed.

Goals

New paradigms in parallel programming, complementary information from different techniques currently not taken into account and integration of successful algorithms from diverse fields in structural biology will be discussed to improve macromolecular structural models.