Aim

At the CBI society, as its name suggests, there has been active exchange among experts with diverse backgrounds. However, barriers between traditional fields still exist, for example, in undergraduate education. To address personalized needs in modern health and drug discovery research, it appears necessary to go beyond conventional interdisciplinary exchanges, pooling knowledge and techniques from a variety of fields to foster new diversity. Recognizing this notion, we have, in this conference, chosen to use the word "modeling," which, though classical, has a broad and diverse scope usage.

In structural biology, the term "modeling" has long been used. Atomic coordinates obtained through X-ray crystallography are presented not as direct observational data but as "models" augmented with chemical knowledge. Experimentation and computation are continuous, a trend that has rapidly accelerated in recent years with advances in cryo-electron microscopy. At the same time, it will be increasingly common for researchers from biological backgrounds to conduct a type of research, where they perform single-cell RNA sequencing analyses, build machine learning models based on the results, select key proteins, and model the three-dimensional structures and interactions of those proteins. As we witness mathematical modeling, in a broader sense including molecular simulations, and data-driven approaches, such as machine learning, advancing in close collaboration, we also wished to emphasize the importance of databases as the foundation of general modeling.  We have, therefore, decided to include the term database in the conference theme.

The above discussion primarily concerned diversity in technology, but the significance of diversity in subject areas is also evident. The expansion from traditional drug discovery through molecular intervention to approaches encompassing health and nutrition research is precisely due to the diversity of diseases and individuals. We hope this conference can contribute to paving the way for the creation of new diversity through multifaceted modeling.

CBI Society 2024 Annual Meeting

President
    Kenji Mizuguchi (Institute for Protein Research, Osaka University)
Organizing Committee Chair
    Yayoi Natsume (National Institutes of Biomedical Innovation, Health and Nutrition)