Dear ISMB 2008 participant:

Thank you very much for contributing toward making ISMB 2008 go down in history as what I hope you found to be one of the most successful, most gratifying, most scientifically communicative events in computational biology ever! Your feedback onsite and through the post-conference survey is very helpful. We will do our best to continue improving the meeting.

In all, 1397 researchers attended the meeting, with an additional 185 attending just the pre-conference SIGs/Satellite Meeting. Partial travel support totaling nearly $80,000 from US federal funding agencies (DOE, NIH, NSF) enabled 114 young scientists to attend the meeting, and the ISCB Student Council secured an additional $7,000 in travel support funds to help seven more students attend the event. Last, but not least, the six corporate sponsors and 23 additional exhibitors contributed in important ways, both financially and by bringing the essential products, tools and services used by bioinformaticians directly to the researcher community at this largest gathering of our science.

ISMB 2008 was covered in a live-feed blog, you can find the link to this Blog along with other recent updated links at the 2008 web site (http://www.iscb.org/cms_addon/conferences/ismb2008/; the direct blog link is http://friendfeed.com/rooms/ismb-2008).

Many requests have come in to share photos from the ISMB. We expect to ultimately build a central repository. However, this resource would ideally be fed by some distributed source. In particular, we are asking you as a participant to share your photographs of ISMB 2008 through flickr (http://flickr.com). Feel free to share your photos of talks, posters, people, Toronto, the reception, dinner, Matrix party, etc. To help others find your photos, please tag all photos with the keyword 'ISMB2008' (all one word, with no space). Currently, we have over 300 photos on flickr, and we hope this number will grow rapidly!

Finally, we hope that we will welcome you and your colleagues at the ISMB/ECCB 2009 in Stockholm (http://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2009/).

with best wishes
Burkhard Rost
ISCB President