Systems Biology Brings Life Sciences Closer

The China-UK Systems Biology Workshop 2005 was held during June 20–21 in the National Science Park of Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. It was organized by the Institute of Bioinformatics, Zhejiang University, and was initiated by Prof. Dr. Jun Zhu (Zhejiang University) and Prof. Dr. John Findlay (University of Leeds, UK). The workshop was part of the program called UK-China Partners in Science, a one-year campaign that was initiated by the British government to explore more collaborations between UK and China on science and technology. It was attended also by a representative of this program, Mr. Frank Yuan, senior science & innovation officer. The idea of the workshop was to bring together experts with specialists in systems biology in order to promote the “natural partnership” between scientists from the two countries. The most important items of systems biology considered at the workshop were: (1) New technologies and advances in systems biology; (2) Research developments in genomics and proteomics; (3) New methodologies and software in computational biology; (4) Research collaboration on systems biology between China and UK. The workshop was opened by Jun Zhu with a welcome to the participants and an introduction to Zhejiang University. The morning session of the first day began with lectures of Bailin Hao (Fudan University, China) and John Findlay. Hao proposed a composition vector approach to analyze prokaryote phylogeny without sequence alignment. It is a systematic way of inferring evolutionary relatedness of microbial organisms from the oligopeptide content, that is, the frequency of amino acid K-strings in their complete proteomes. The method circumvents the ambiguity of choosing the genes for phylogenetic reconstruction and avoids the necessity of aligning sequences of essentially different lengths and gene contents. It can incorporate the effect of lateral gene transfer to some extent and leads to results comparable with the bacteriologists’ systematics as reflected in the Bergey’s Manual of Systematic Bacteriology. Findlay intro-