By Joshua Havumaki and Ty Thomson

Many from Plectix attended the International Conference on Systems Biology (ICSB) last week at Stanford University.  In attendance were hundreds of attendees from all over the world.  Although the vast majority of participants were academics, the commercial sector was also represented.

The talks were quite diverse and ranged from the usual, high throughput methodologies to light sheet based fluorescence microscopy. However, much of the work presented was centered on specific pathways of clinical relevance as opposed to general tools or methodologies. Talks at the q-bio conference in early August were a bit broader in scope, describing tools and methodologies (both experimental and computational) that can be applied to the system or cellular level. Despite the differences in the talks, the attendees at both conferences seemed to have similar backgrounds judging by the posters presented.

The tutorials at ICSB were well attended and featured many tools for deterministic and stochastic modeling, including Virtual Cell and Systems Biology Workbench. In our own experiences (both attending tutorials and demoing Cellucidate) there is a definite necessity to provide more illustrative and interesting examples and a more interactive and hands-on approach to tutorials leads to a more successful outcome of engaging audiences. We certainly have struggled with this problem and there is more to be done in this area.

We presented two posters that covered some representative models in Cellucidate and the computational approaches behind the scenes - "Modeling Dysregulation of Complex Systems Implicated in Cancer and Diabetes" and "Scalable Methods for Modeling Complex Cell Signaling Systems". Both generated a steady stream of interest during their respective poster sessions. Ty Thomson also gave a polished, though somewhat impromptu talk on rule-based modeling and Cellucidate at the 14th Annual SBML Workshop.

It would have been nice to have more time set aside for attendees to discuss different perspectives and opinions of the future in the field. However, overall this conference did provide a comprehensive picture of current developments and research in systems biology.