Calls

The Bioinformatics Italian Society is glad to invite you to its 19th 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 Abstracts

Abstract submission is requested 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 • Genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics and epitranscriptomics • Computational RNA Biology • Proteomics • Systems Biology • Molecular Evolution • Translational Bioinformatics • Structural Bioinformatics • Pharmacogenomics • Bioimaging • Metagenomics and metatranscriptomics • Artificial Intelligence for Bioinformatics • Multi-omics data analysis and integration • Single-cell data analysis • Spatial transcriptomics • Biological data management

In addition to the traditional panels, the Call includes topics for a Food & Nutrition (F&N) session, a workshop on Advanced machine-learning approaches for the analysis of microbiome data, and a Young BITS-RSG-InfoLife Symposium.

Food & Nutrition Session

Prevention and personalisation of treatments represent the evolving revolution of precision medicine. Nutrigenomics studies the molecular mechanisms of the actions of nutrients on gene expression and cellular metabolism and their influence on human health. Scientific progress in this field has demonstrated a strong correlation between nutrition and inflammatory, chronic degenerative diseases and tumours, providing innovative diagnostic, prevention and treatment strategies. The F&N Session welcomes contributions on bioinformatics tools and services, including the use of standards for data reuse and sharing, and for interoperability of food and nutrition data, bioinformatics methods for data interpretation and management and the identification of new nutrition biomarkers for more effective prognostic, diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.

Advanced machine-learning approaches for the analysis of microbiome data Workshop

The analysis of the human microbiome has recently attracted the attention of several research communities, due to its potential diagnostics, prognostics, and therapeutics role for several diseases, including diabetes, liver cirrhosis, some types of cancer (e.g., colorectal cancer) as well as for disorders like the autism spectrum disorder. The adoption of statistical and Machine Learning approaches appears very promising to elucidate existing (or identify novel) relationships between microbiome conditions and diseases or to build descriptive and predictive models that can be adopted to improve existing therapeutic procedures. The workshop “Advanced machine learning approaches for the analysis of microbiome data” will focus on advanced machine learning approaches and their (potential or actual) application to microbiome data, including semi-supervised learning methods, multi-view learning methods, and transfer learning approaches.

Young BITS-RSG-InfoLife CINI Symposium

Co-organized with RSG-Italy, the Italian Regional Student Group of ISCB, and the CINI InfoLife young group, the Young BITS-RSG-InfoLife CINI 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.

Abstract selection for oral and poster presentations

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

Presentation of selected contributions requires early registration to the conference of the presenting author after the acceptance notification. Each participant can submit up to one abstract for oral communication and one or two posters.

Call for Travel Grant

The Bioinformatics Italian Society provides young researchers with travel grants for attending its Annual Meeting. This year, thanks to the support of EMBnet, BITS is glad to enlarge the participation of young researchers from abroad by providing three additional travel grants (international travel grants) that will be assigned to PhD student or Post Doc attending their specialisation course in other countries than Italy.

Important dates
Travel grant submission opens March 28th, 2023 and closes May 18th, 2023

The travel grant request must be submitted by the following link

National Travel Grant

Eligibility
Researchers without a permanent position and submitting an abstract to the conference as first, last or presenter author may apply to the BITS2023 Travel Grant programme.

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 a travel grant.As a first round of assignments, applications by researchers under 35 years (BITS or EMBnet members) will be considered. In the case of unassigned grants, a second round will consider all other applications. Finally, if grants are still unassigned, a last round will consider applications from non-BITS members who had asked to become members. Within each round, in case of the same score, priority will be given to researchers that participated in previous BITS meetings and did not receive any BITS Travel Grants (applies only to BITS members).

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 the presentation of a declaration of sustained costs, with the specific statement that these are not reimbursed by other sources. Details on to whom address the reimbursement claim will be communicated to winners in the notification they will receive from BITS.
The winners will receive a grant amounting to € 300.00 if working in Italy. The registration fee for the meeting will be applied according to the rules reported in the registration form.

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

International Travel Grant

Eligibility
PhD students or PostDoc working abroad and submitting an abstract to the conference as first, last or presenter author.

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 the 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 that will consist in the reimbursement of costs for the conference attendance up to € 1,000.00. Eligible costs are the BITS 2023 registration fee (including the social dinner, if desired), travel expenses and hotel accommodation for up to three nights. A letter by the PhD or Post Doc supervisor or by the Director of the Department or Institute certifying the student course attendance across the affiliation declared in the submitted abstract has to be provided when submitting the request for the travel grant.

Information and contacts
For any information request, please contact Domenica D’Elia by email: domenica.delia@ba.itb.cnr.it