Third International Meeting
Organizers: Andrzej K. Konopka and Peter Salamon
Meeting Coordinator: Danielle A.M. Konings

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF WORKSHOP'S OBJECTIVES

As in previous years presentations and discussions will be grouped in four areas:
1) Novel research results in sequence analysis that lead to explanation of some biological phenomena.
2) Research pertaining to new molecular biology software.
3) Epistemological aspects of Computational Molecular Biology.
4) Ethical and sociological factors that contribute to Computational Molecular Biology paradigm.

Results emerging from collaborations initiated by 1991 and 1992 workshops will consist about half of presentations pertaining to areas #1 and #2. Another half of presentations in these areas will include new topics that have not been discussed during previous Open Problems in CMB workshops. Among the topics of presentations and discussions known to date we can list:
-- compositional complexity of nucleotide and protein sequences
-- text segmenting algorithms that can be useful in genome analysis
-- new methodologies for large database searches and for evaluation of biological significance of results of such searches
-- putative biological roles of repetitive sequences in eukaryotic genomes
-- new methodologies of aligning sequences according to their known or derived structural and functional features
-- use of knowledge databases to determine appropriate alphabets for sequence comparison
-- use of knowledge database for automatic sequence annotation and retrieval
-- databes of properties derived from known sequences (second and higher generation databases); their design and possible use in genome analysis

Discussion of methodological and epistemological aspects of Computational Molecular Biology (area #3) is a unique feature of Telluride workshops. The 1991 and 1992 workshops on Open Problems in Computational Molecular Biology were concerned with language and machine metaphors respectively. The focus of the planned 1993 workshop will be a more general problem of legacy and prospects of modelling (particularly mathematical modelling) in molecular biology.

Among the tentative, general topics we should list:
-- problem of induction in biology
-- legacy and prospects of "relational" molecular biology
-- ways to evaluate "formalizability" of descriptions of biological phenomena
-- ontology of "fact" in biology
-- concept of "truth" in theoretical molecular biology
-- concepts of "situation" and "information content" in molecular biology

More specific, technical aspects of modelling in molecular biology will also be discussed. Among those we can tentativlly list:
-- thermodynamics of biological phenomena
-- topobiology and mechanistic models of morphogenesis
-- epigenetic information and concepts of formative causation
-- non-orthodox possibility measures and their use in genome sequence analysis
-- computational complexity of selected sequence analysis problems
-- logical aspect of pragmatic inference in sequence data analysis