This working session will take place from February 7 - February 14, 2025

This year, we will bring together ~50 researchers and trainees to discuss new methods and cutting-edge approaches for high-throughput sequencing analysis. The theme is virus and microbial genomics Technologies to profile these extremely complex communities of ‘’small organisms’’ have developed very quickly and it is now routine and cost effective to sample the microbiome across a broad range of domains.

The days are organized as discussions around specific themes, with one-on-one exchanges between experts and trainees. The invitees this year cover domains such as the microbiome of the human gut/oral/respiratory/urogenital in the context of health and disease; clinical metagenomics; of animals in relation to food production systems; the microbiome and diet; fungal viruses; approaches for identifying new microbes. The meeting will also cover high-throughput systems level approaches for studying microbes including genetic screens, single-cell bacterial/fungal profiling, microfluidic sample handling, improved CRISPR/CasX modification toolkits, synthetic biology along with core biostatistical computational approaches including generative modeling in microscopy, sample decomposition and compositional data (CODA) analyses.

Computational Paradigms in Molecular Biology Revisited will take place from February 2 - February 9, 2024

The past decade has witnessed the rapid development of new computational techniques and paradigms in computational biology. These approaches emerged from the machine learning, probabilistic modeling, statistical inference and artificial intelligence communities and have been further refined within the context of a broad range of applications in molecular biology. This meeting brings together researchers who have expertise with generative modeling and deep learning across a range of different applications including structural biology, drug repositioning and discovery, generative models for single cell analyses, metagenomics, and molecular imaging. Many of our invitees are also committed to the development of computational devices with clinical utility. Such endpoints also raise important ethical and socioeconomic considerations that also must be addressed for AI-related tools to be fully incorporated into modern molecular biology and clinical applications.

Cells in Space will take place from January 27th - February 3rd, 2023.

This year will be our 21st Systems Biology workshop: over the past two decades, these meetings have brought together individuals working in the diverse range of fields.

This meeting brings together researchers interested in exploring cells in their context. Recent advances have reinforced the importance of understanding where cells are localized in tissues to further characterize their similarity and differences (cell types) and shed light on their interactions, communication and functionality.

The invitees collectively champion the development and/or application of EXPERIMENTAL approaches to identify the physical location of cells based on sequencing or imaging methods, and COMPUTATIONAL models to analyze cellular information and/or predict its location.

We are excited to extend discussions to how a wide variety of external factors and stressors, such as space travel, the exposure to microgravity and space radiation, the synergistic effect of microbiomes, infection processes, tumor microenvironments, etc., influence or alter cellular expression and epigenetics programs.

Encoding an Decoding Function in the Genome. Friday February 4th to Friday February 11th, 2022

This meeting brings together researchers interested in approaches that systematically modify and perturb genomes in order

• [DECODE] to understand the function of the target loci in terms of gene expression and regulation;
• [ENCODE] to modify the function of the target loci to change its expression and regulation for specific goals.

The invitees collectively champion modern -omic approaches that often include precise genome editing (eg CRISPR/Cas9) applied to populations in a high-throughput manner using different strategies (eg lentiviral infections or robotic delivery), tracked in different ways (eg competitive growth assays versus single cell droplet encapsulation), and profiled with -omic and microscopy technologies. Such systematic screens are central to exploring

• to build codebooks describing interactions between DNA, RNA, protein, and genome struture;
• to decipher the multivariate biology of higher order genetic and biochemical interactions;
• to understand the interconnected relationships in systems from ecology, health, and disease;
• to efficiently optimize systems in the context of synthetic biology.

Emerging Model Systems. January 24th-31st.

This meeting brings together researchers interested in the development of new model organisms. Such models either facilitate exciting new questions that can be asked for the first time, or facilitate unprecedented ability to explore long-standing fundamental questions central to the life sciences. The emergence of many new “non-model” model systems recently is at least in part due to recent advancements in gene editing technologies, cellular imaging, and single cell genomics. Therefore, the workshop also seeks to bring investigators interested in the advancement of such techniques to better exploit the unique biological features of these organisms.

The invitees collectively champion emerging model systems across a broad swath of the Tree of Life. This includes

• Protist, bacterial and fungal unicellular model systems for studying, for example, carbon sequestration in marine sytems, single cellular regeneration, and genome organization.
• Individuals who have developed novel models in multicellular organisms including sytems to study regeneration, tissue morphology, and neural function.
• Researchers with models that may more accurately recapitulate key aspects of human disease in comparison to current systems.
• Researchers interested in the development of models to study organismal interactions in different environments.
• Experts in developing synthetic biology, -omics, microscopy and computational/statistical biology approaches to model systems.

SC-SEQ-&-MPRAs

This meeting brings together researchers interested in the development of single cell (SC-Seq) sequencing-based approaches and massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs), in addition to computational bioogists interested in asking new types of questions facilitated by these technologies in variety of biological systems.

Unless indicated otherwise, the talks are scheduled to be 30 minutes.

Here we focused on the genomic of coral and its microbiome.

Here we focused on the role of the immune system in cancer progression, and on the development of cancer immunotherapies.

The focus of this meeting had much of the CCBR-Donnelly in attendance. It was on genetic interaction networks of different types in model organisms.

The focus of this meeting was on computational models of tumorigenesis and tumoral evolution, and studies of early breast lesions.

This meeting brought down many members of the international microRNA community wheree we discussed research, current challenges and the way onward.

This meeting focused on the development of genomics-based approaches for the identification and implementation of biomarkerss for patient prognosis and benefit to therapy.

This meeting focused on transcription factors, protein-DNA binding and the complex network of regulatory dependencies they induce.

The central topic of this meeting was to explore the use of techniques from systems biology including high-throughput profiling, modelling and multivariate biomarker panels in the context of breast cancer.

This meeting focused on genomics approaches in breast cancer to study both murine models and the human disease.

The invitees discusssed protein-protein, genetic and chemical-genetic interactions in both model organsisms and humans.

This meeting brought together researchers interested in understanding how genomic instability, and the evolution of neoplastic genomes, affects cancer progression.

This meeting brought together researchers interested in diseases of the secretory pathway with special emphasis on the endoplasmic reticulum

This was the first of our Barbados meetings to focus on breast cancer.

Our third Barbados workshop focused on proteomics including protein-protein interactions, mass spectrometry and general structural biology.

Our second Barbados workshop focused on the development of algorithms for identifying transcription factor binding sites.

Our first Barbados workshop focused on the development of algorithms for exploring genome evolution.