James B. Campbell, head of Virginia Techs geography department and an organizer of the conference, said exchanges across the disciplines are mutually beneficial. "Whether the maps used in a discipline are derived from aerial photos taken by a satellite, as with GIS, or discoveries at the microscopic level that are mapped by gene researchers, many of the processes and technologies are similar or the same," he said.
Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) Director Bruno Sobral agreed. "The notion of a map goes all the way from the level of a genome to a map of the United States," he said. "Bioinformatics has focused on modeling from the level of the molecules up to the whole organism, while GIS has created tools to model from the level of the ecosystem down." Sobral said this makes the individual organism "a perfect meeting point for the two communities."
Jacquez described what was, from his perspective, the symposiums biggest take-home lesson: "After years of using GIS data to track diseases in populations in terms of the what, where, and when, the integration of bioinformatics datagenomics and proteomics data telling the story of what takes place at the cell and sub-cell level in individual diseased organismswill soon enable epidemiologists using GIS to capture the how of disease outbreaks." Integrating bioinformatics with GIS, he said, will be "phenomenally useful" in predicting public health outcomes.
Encouraging dialog among the fields, Sobral said, will enable researchers using GIS, for instance epidemiologists, to home in on individual cases. At the same time, he said, geneticists will be able to widen their purview, "noting, for example, how the incidence of congenital disease varies over space, over time, and with changes to terrain and climate."
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Contact: James B. Campbell Jr.
jayhawk@vt.edu
540-231-5841
Virginia Tech
28-Jun-2001