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Welcome to ICMSB2011

The XII International Congress on Molecular Systems Biology (ICMSB2011) will be held at the Universitat de Lleida (Spain), in May 2011. The main theme for this meeting will be Biological Design Principles.

The meeting will be a four days event, with an additional welcoming day before we start. Each of the days will focus mostly on a theme. Thus, we will have four main subjects:

• Day 1: Modularity, Design Principles & Evolution.
• Day 2: Optimization and evolution.
• Day 3: Model building, network reconstruction and parameter estimation.
• Day 4: From design principles to synthetic biology. Possible industrial applications

We look forward for your contributions to each of the days!!!

What do we like the meeting to be?

We would like this congress to be a fruitful meeting place to do both, report on the latest advances and plan the next steps to improve our understanding of the different subject areas. In addition, this meeting is also dedicated to celebrate Michael Savageau's contributions to Systems Biology, on his 70th birthday and on the 40th anniversary of his seminal papers on the power-law formalism.

The meeting has a central theme: Identification of Design Principles in molecular networks. We encourage participants to present their work in this area and to participate in the lively discussions that will be held during the event.

We have planed the meeting to potentiate the opportunities for interaction and open discussion. Talks should emphasize and discuss both, examples and the conceptual problems related to the identification, understanding, and evolutionary emergence of design principles. They should also focus on the technical aspects that can help in studying such principles.

Keynote speakers will be asked to prepare their contributions well in advance and to distribute an informative summary. We will post these summaries and will provide links to the main references. Special invited speakers will be asked to discuss these contributions and provide support or criticism to those presentations. Complementary talks will be selected from submitted abstracts for further contributing to the discussion of the points raised by the keynote speakers. Two poster evenings with discussion sessions will be scheduled to provide everyone an opportunity to contribute to the meeting.

As this is also a meeting that continues a long tradition started more than 20 years ago, we will welcome old pictures that may help track changes in our colleagues. You can upload your pictures here.

We hope you find the meeting of interest to you and that you decide to join us in Lleida!!