ANN ARBOR, Mich. - The National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics and the University of Michigan Center for Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics are hosting the 7^th Annual Cytoscape Retreat and Symposium, July 18-20, 2010. The event will be held at the North Campus Research Complex.

Cytoscape is an open source bioinformatics software platform for visualizing molecular interaction networks and integrating these interactions with gene expression profiles and other data. The symposium will focus on Cytoscape development and applications to biological and biomedical visualization challenges.

"We're honored to host this event," says Brian Athey, Ph.D., professor, biomedical informatics, chair designate, University of Michigan Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, and director, Academic Informatics, U-M Medical School. "Cytoscape is used internationally, and the support unity to bring the developers together with world-class experts in applied systems biology is unparalleled."

The full day symposium on Monday, July 19 will focus on "Networks in Disease and Health." Leroy Hood, M.D., Ph.D.; Stephen Friend, M.D., Ph.D.; Marc Vidal, Ph.D.; Charlie Boone, Ph.D.; Mark Newman, Ph.D., Peter Zandstra, Ph.D.; and others will give presentations. The symposium will be preceded on July 18 by a day of tutorials and Cytoscape plug-in demonstrations, and a Cytoscape developers workshop will take place following the symposium, on July 20.

Faculty and staff members who will be interested in attending include biomedical and health informatics researchers, computational biologists, statistical geneticists, molecular biologists, physician-scientists with interests in human disease, computer scientists and developers working on biology-related projects.

For more information and to register, go to http://cytoscape.wodaklab.org/wiki/CytoscapeRetreat2010. Questions should be sent to ncibi-help@umich.edu.