Proceedings of the 2014 MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS) Conference

The MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS 2014) held its eleventh annual conference at the Wes Watkins Center at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater on March 7-8, 2014. The theme was "From Genome to Phenome: Connecting the Dots". Conference Chair this year was Rakesh Kaundal, who is also one of the MCBIOS board members, and conference committee members were Ulrich K. Melcher and Doris Kupfer. The current president is Andy Perkins and Cesar Compadre was elected as President-Elect for 2015-16. There were 154 registrants and a total of 125 abstracts submitted (50 oral and 75 poster presentations). Keynote speakers were Owen White from The University of Maryland School of Medicine, whose talk was titled "The Human Microbiome Project: Large-Scale Data Management and Analysis", and Jody Hey from Temple University "Designing Genealogy Samplers for Population Genetics". Dr. William Slikker, Director of the Food and Drug Administration's, National Center for Toxicological Research, concluded with a talk on the past ten years of MCBIOS and a perspective on its future. Participants also had the opportunity to attend a workshop on next-generation sequencing (NGS), hosted by Peter Hoyt of OSU and Dr. Graham Wiley of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. The workshop had a keynote by Dr. Joshua Orvis of The University of Maryland School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University on genome annotation. The winners of conference awards were: Best Paper Award: Zongliang Yue, Ping Wan, Hui Huang, Zhan Xie and Jake Y. Chen for "SLDR: A Method to Identify New Gene Regulatory Relationship Candidates" [1] Best Paper Runner-up: Nam S Vo and Vinhthuy Phan for "Exploiting dependencies of pairwise-comparison outcomes to predict patterns of gene response" [2] Best Oral Presentations (Post-Doctoral fellows): Michael A. Bauer, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Erich A. Peterson, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Best Oral Presentations (students): Karl Walker, Arkansas State University, 1st place Shraddha Thakkar, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, 2nd place Mihir Jaiswal, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 3rd place Best Poster (Computation): Stephen Reichley, Mississippi State University, 1st place Kushal Bohra, Texas A&M University at Commerce, 2nd place Austin McCullough, John Brown University, 3rd place Best Poster (Biology): Shraddha Thakkar, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, 1st place Sunetra Das, University of Oklahoma, 2nd place (tie) Garima Saxena, University of North Texas, 2nd place (tie) Kangmei Zhao, University of Oklahoma, 2nd place (tie)