The Bioinformatics Italian Society is glad to invite you to its 18th Annual Conference.

The conference highlights keynote talks by excellent scientists in bioinformatics and its applications, presentations of state-of-the-art research in bioinformatics and computational biology, and poster sessions on the latest research progress.

Call for Travel Grant

The Bioinformatics Italian Society provides young researchers with travel grants for attending its Annual Meeting.

Eligibility
Researchers without a permanent position and submitting an abstract to the conference as first, last or presenter author may apply to the BITS2022 Travel Grant program.

Evaluation
Travel Grants will be awarded according to the scores assigned by the Scientific Committee to the submitted abstracts, and only for abstracts with at least 3 as mean score (max=5). Only the best scoring attendee per each research group may be assigned with a travel grant. As a first round of assignment, applications by researchers under 35 years and BITS members will be considered. In case of unassigned grants, a second round will consider all other applications by BITS members. Finally, if grants are still unassigned, a last round will consider applications from non - BITS members having asked to become member. Within each round, in case of same score, priority will be given to researchers that participated in previous BITS meetings and did not receive any BITS Travel Grants.

Grants
Each Travel Grant will be credited to the bank account of selected candidates after the conference, provided that they effectively attended the meeting and presented their scientific contribution, and under presentation of a declaration of sustained costs, with the specific statement that these are not reimbursed by other sources. The winners will receive a grant amounting to € 300.00 The registration fee to the meeting will be applied according to the rules reported into the registration form.

Information and contacts
For any information request, please contact the BITS Secretary by email:
segretario@bioinformatics.it

Important dates
Travel grant submission opens May 18, 2022
Travel grant submission deadline May 29, 2022

The travel grant must be sumbitted by the following link 

Call for Abstracts and Posters

Submissions are invited for poster and oral contributions to the annual meeting of the Bioinformatics Italian Society (BITS). 

The following topics are covered during the conference (but are not limited to):

 Algorithms for Bioinformatics • Biological Databases • Gene regulation, transcriptomics and epigenomics • Protein structure and function • Systems Biology • Molecular Evolution analysis • Biological Networks • Personal genome analysis • Personal medicine • Translational medicine •  Pharmacogenomics • Sequencing and genotyping technologies • Bioimaging • Pangenomics • Metagenomics • Machine learning in Bioinformatics • Interpretable Machine learning • Multi-omics data analysis and integration • Single-cell data analysis • Spatial transcriptomics • Biological data management 

 In addition to the traditional panels, this year the Call includes topics for one Special Session proposed by members of the Society on Individual Genome Analysis, a workshop on Bioinformatics for Unraveling Brain Complexity, and a Young BITS-RSG Symposium.

The advent of sequencing technologies significantly improves the amount and quality of the available omics data, by allowing the collection of biological information even related to single individuals. Individual Genome Analysis aims to understand which biological features distinguish individuals from each other. In recent years, we observed an increasing interest from the bioinformatics community in developing new computational approaches investigating the potential effects of personal genetic variants, integrating diverse omics data. For example, the introduction of pangenome graphs has enabled us to succinctly record and efficiently query thousands of genomes, by encoding shared and individual haplotypes based on a population of individuals. The extension of classical bioinformatics analysis to the genome graph framework enabled to fully exploit the power of such data structures, enabling variant- and haplotype-aware analyses on populations of individuals, as in the context of transcription factor binding sites prediction or ChIP-seq peak calling. Moreover, the combination of efficient data structures and parallel computing enabled the rapid, high-throughput and variant-aware in silico identification of CRISPR off-target site identification, within the context of genome editing. This special session is devoted to collecting contributions on every aspect of individual-oriented omics data analysis, including novel algorithms, data structures, and their clinical or biological translations. 

Brain science is a cutting-edge study field that holds enormous potential for better understanding, preventing, and treating a variety of diseases that impact millions of patients. The human brain is the most complex organ in the human body. It contains billions of highly differentiated and interconnected cells that form intricate and complex neural networks, involved in everything from physical to high-level cognitive functions. Dysfunctions of this complex network caused by both genetic and environmental factors may result in many brain disorders. Initiatives like the Human BRAIN Project are starting to shed light on the complexity of the human brain gathering, organizing, and sharing data describing the brain and related diseases. Understanding how the brain works poses big challenges that require the integrative analysis of big data ranging from single-cell trascriptomics, proteomics, imaging and mapping technologies through the use of computational approaches such as system biology, AI and/or bioinformatics. The Bioinformatics for Unraveling Brain Complexity workshop will focus on the methodological and computational aspects capable of highlighting the brain complexity and proposing mechanisms in healthy and pathological conditions.

Co-organized with RSG-Italy, the Italian Regional Student Group of ISCB, the Young BITS-RSG Symposium provides a supportive and stimulating forum in which undergraduate, master and PhD students, as well as young researchers, have the opportunity to present and discuss their research with other members of the Italian Bioinformatics community 

The abstracts will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee and accepted for oral communication or poster presentation or rejected in case they do not match the scientific standards of the conference. Two or three anonymous referees will evaluate each abstract. We encourage the authors to use the maximum space available in the submission form in order to describe at the best their work and results. Accepted abstracts will be collected in the conference proceedings.

Abstract submission requires early registration to the conference of the presenting author after the acceptance notification. Participants may submit up to a maximum of one oral communication and one poster, or two posters.

Articles presented as poster or oral can be submitted as full papers at BMC Bioinformatics for possible publication in a supplement dedicated to BITS 2022.

Full articles will go through the journal's standard peer review process for supplements. We are also in contact with JBI (Journal of Biomedical Informatics) or AIM (Artificial Intelligence in Medicine) for a special issue dedicated to the papers that make a "conceptual contribution to the field, typically by describing an innovation in methodology or technique or by discussing substantive generalizable lessons that have been learned in the context of an informatics project".

Key dates

Submission

Contacts