The 1st Structural Bioinformatics Symposium & I-TASSER 2018 workshop will be held from November 23 to November 25, 2018 in Hangzhou, China. The conference will be hosted by Peak Discipline Control Science and Engineering, and College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology (ZJUT). This conference provides an open platform to facilitate in-depth communication and cooperation among researchers of structural bioinformatics, molecular biology, data science, and artificial intelligence. Discussions will focus on recent progress, existing challenges, novel theories and new methodologies in structural bioinformatics.

  A central topic of this conference will be I-TASSER, a computational tool for automated protein structure prediction developed by the Yang Zhang lab from the University of Michigan. The I-TASSER server has been ranked as the top method for structure prediction in the international Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP) experiments six consecutive times, and has therefore earned its reputation as the most consistently accurate tool for protein structure prediction. As of November 2018, the server has completed predictions for 431,382 proteins submitted by 102,961 users from 140 countries.

  The conference will be held at the Kaiyuan Hotel (next to the Chengbei Sports Park), 538 Shaoxing Rd, Xiacheng district, Hangzhou, Zhejiang. The host city, Hangzhou, is located on the southeast coast of China, near the lower reaches of the Qiantang River and the southern end of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. Hangzhou is known for its beautiful scenery and mild climate, and is referred to as "paradise on earth", the "land of fish and rice", the "home of silk", and "cultural relics".

  All are welcome to attend the conference and share their research stories. Online registration is mandatory but free. The program for the workshop can be found here.

  The conference was supported by the Peak Discipline Control Science and Engineering of ZJUT, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61773346).