The annual Rocky Mountain Conference on Bioinformatics, better known just as “Rocky,”
celebrated its tenth meeting in 2012. Rocky has a unique approach in bioinformatics,
bringing attention to new scientists and working hard to facilitate the creation of
new collaborations and relationships. Set in the spectacular scenery of the Roaring
Fork Valley, not far from world-renowned Aspen, Colorado, Rocky offers a world-class
locale to accompany great science. Although many of the 127 attendees were from the
Rocky Mountain region, scientists came from as far away as Egypt and Korea to join
the meeting. Rocky runs two-and-a-half days, organized with keynote addresses bracketing
lightning talks and ski breaks.
The 2012 keynotes included well-known academic stars Chris Mungall and Olga Troyanskaya,
senior thinkers from industry Kirk Jordan and Alex Stewart, and rising young informaticians
James Costello, Yuval Itan, and Chris Miller. Miller described novel metagenomic methods
that he used to characterize microbiome communities in some of the most polluted sites
on earth, describing how to increase sensitivity for detection of rare organisms,
and characterizing the surprisingly rich ecosystems found in extremely toxic environments.
Itan presented a method for building a network of biological (rather than strictly
genetic) relationships among all human genes, then applied graph algorithms to discover
disease-causing alleles at genomic scale. He also described impressive experimental
validations of his predictions. Costello discussed his analysis of the DREAM competition,
where dozens of groups analyzed blinded data regarding gene regulatory networks and
genetic determinants of drug response. He demonstrated the value of multiple, independent
approaches to difficult prediction problems, and inverted the original goal of the
competition to provide insights into the differential predictive power of different
sorts of data. Mungall described recent advances in biomedical ontology, which increasingly
support complex logical inference, providing complementary information to the traditional
statistical analysis of genomic data. Troyanskaya presented a plethora of recent results
from her lab, including a remarkable informatics approach to deconvolving cell type–
and tissue–specific contributions to gene function and regulation. Jordan described
the latest innovations in IBM's high performance computing division, and showcased
some impressive applications in medicine, physiological modeling, and sequence analysis.
Stewart described SomaLogic's impressive technology that quantitatively assays the
abundance of more than 1,000 proteins, demonstrated its clinical utility in stable
coronary heart disease, and talked about the informatics challenges involved.
In addition to these keynote addresses, 46 scientists from around the world presented
7-minute talks on their research. The purpose of the lightning talks is to briefly
introduce the work of each scientist, facilitating more detailed conversations during
the abundant free time provided. The topics of the lightning talks spanned a huge
range of bioinformatics, from an ENCODE analysis shedding light on the plasticity
of replication timing dependent on chromatin structure to an ontological analysis
of the discourse structure of scientific journal articles. Topics ranged from phylogenetics
to drug response in cancer, and the methods described covered an enormous range, including,
for example, mechanistic modeling, Bayesian inference, text mining, and phylogeography.
Several of the presenters were giving their first public scientific talk. Rocky is
proud of its history of giving the first stage to many young investigators who have
gone on to impressive careers. Given the large number of speakers, it is relatively
easy to get a chance to present relevant work. There was even one undergraduate researcher
reporting on his (impressive!) results. The conference environment sets a relaxed
environment for graduate students, postdocs, and other early stage researchers to
interact with senior scientists. A remarkably large number of Rocky participants report
that new interactions and collaborations arose from their attendance at the meeting,
and nearly all say the experience exceeded their expectations.
Next year's Rocky is already in preparation, and will be held at the Viceroy Hotel
in Snowmass, CO, December 12–14, 2013. The later dates should help with the snow coverage,
and the scientific agenda promises to once again be outstanding. We hope to see you
there.