"4D Biology for health and disease" workshop report

The "4D Biology Workshop for Health and Disease", held on 16-17th ofMarch 2010 in Brussels, aimed at finding the best organising principlesfor large-scale proteomics, interactomics and structural genomics/biology initiatives, and setting the vision for future high-throughputresearch and large-scale data gathering in biological and medical science.Major conclusions of the workshop include the following. (i)Development of new technologies and approaches to data analysis iscrucial. Biophysical methods should be developed that span a broadrange of time/spatial resolution and characterise structures andkinetics of interactions. Mathematics, physics, computational andengineering tools need to be used more in biology and new tools needto be developed. (ii) Database efforts need to focus on improveddefinitions of ontologies and standards so that system-scale data andassociated metadata can be understood and shared efficiently. (iii)Research infrastructures should play a key role in fosteringmultidisciplinary research, maximising knowledge exchange betweendisciplines and facilitating access to diverse technologies. (iv)Understanding disease on a molecular level is crucial. Systemapproaches may represent a new paradigm in the search for biomarkersand new targets in human disease. (v) Appropriate education andtraining should be provided to help efficient exchange of knowledgebetween theoreticians, experimental biologists and clinicians. Theseconclusions provide a strong basis for creating major possibilities inadvancing research and clinical applications towards personalisedmedicine.Biophysical Structural Chemistr

Strong disorder RG approach – a short review of recent developments

The strong disorder RG approach for random systems has been extended in many new directions since our previous review of 2005 [F. Igloi, C. Monthus, Phys. Rep. 412, 277 (2005)]. The aim of the present colloquium paper is thus to give an overview of these various recent developments. In the field of quantum disordered models, recent progress concern infinite disorder fixed points for short-ranged models in higher dimensions d > 1, strong disorder fixed points for long-ranged models, scaling of the entanglement entropy in critical ground-states and after quantum quenches, the RSRG-X procedure to construct the whole set excited stated and the RSRG-t procedure for the unitary dynamics in many-body-localized phases, the Floquet dynamics of periodically driven chains, the dissipative effects induced by the coupling to external baths, and Anderson Localization models. In the field of classical disordered models, new applications include the contact process for epidemic spreading, the strong disorder renormalization procedure for general master equations, the localization properties of random elastic networks, and the synchronization of interacting non-linear dissipative oscillators. Application of the method for aperiodic (or deterministic) disorder is also mentioned