by NADIA EL-MABROUK

The MAGE conference took place in the Hô- tomato, coffee, Utricularia and other core eudicots). tel Château-Bromont, in Québec’s beautiful East- Following Sankoff’s talk, a couple of partici- ern Townships region on Augsut 23-26, and gave a pants presented their more biologically oriented retrospective and prospective view on comparative talks (participants were: Joseph Nadeau, Aoife by commemorating the 50 years of scien- McLysaght, Eric Lyons, Victor Albert). Later during tific contribution of David Sankoff. the day, another group of participants (Tao Jiang, Pavel Pevzner, Dannie Durand, Meidanis and Yan- David Sankoff is known as one of the founding copoulos, Binhai Zhu) gave talks on more method- fathers of and . ological and algorithmic aspects of their research. He has been at the origin of numerous fields in The three-day conference closed on Monday bioinformatics, starting with the fundamental morning with presentations on future research di- problem of . In particular, he rections. For example, of U. Tel Aviv contributed to the early introduction of dynamic presented his work on the massive theoretical and programming to computational biology. empirical study of rearrangements in cancer cells. This event was a unique opportunity to come to- This event brought together the most renowned gether, to trace the developments that had led to the scientists in computational biology as well as the fu- discipline of bioinformatics and computational biol- ture generation of young researchers and students. ogy, and to discuss the challenges that lied ahead. For example, Anne Bergeron of UQAM, Montréal, It was also a great occasion for the publication of who kicked off the event by putting David Sankoff’s a volume consisting of fourteen chapters by partic- early career into perspective, presented an amusing ipants in MAGE, in the Springer series "Computa- short film depicting a successful live test of David’s tional Biology". This book was highly anticipated by 1990 music recognition algorithm. the community. For my part, some chapters are al- Joseph Felsenstein of U. Washington, appeared ready serving as reading material for my graduate via a web video from Seattle, recalling the precur- courses in bioinformatics! sors of bioinformatics and computational biology in For more detail on the MAGE conference, please David’s work at the Centre de Recherches Mathé- check out their website: matiques de l’Université de Montréal. He reminded http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~mabrouk/MAGE2013/ us of Sankoff’s collaboration with late Robert Ced- index.php ergren, and his inspiring personality, which was deeply moving to many audience members who knew Robert. Sunday was another eventful day. David Sankoff talked about his most recent work with Chunfang Zheng of U. Ottawa, on the evolution of plants through cycles of polyploidization and fractiona- tion, follow by presentations on modeling (infer- ence of ancestral genomes and of evolutionary dis- tances) and applications (to the genome evolution of Participants at the MAGE meeting

SMB Newsletter, January 2014, Volume 27, No 1 Page 6