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+antiSMASH: Searching for New Antibiotics Using Open Source Tools
+----------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Ever since Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic being produced by
+a Penicillium mould in 1928, scientists have been searching bacteria and fungi
+for new substances to combat infectious diseases. In the last 40 years however,
+only few new substances have been discovered that actually reached the market.
+In the arms race between bacteria developing new resistances and humanity
+developing new antibiotics, a more organized approach on drug discovery can
+keep us from falling behind. With the advent of high throughput genetic
+sequencing, a large number of bacterial genome sequences have become available
+for analysis. Rather than testing every candidate strain for antimicrobial
+activity and then painstakingly isolating and characterizing the substance
+causing this activity, it has now become viable to predict the substances a
+bacterium can produce using computer-based prediction algorithms.
+
+antiSMASH is an Open Source pipeline that combines all published methods for
+predicting antibiotics and other interesting small-molecular substances
+produced by bacteria and fungi from their genomic sequence. By combining
+existing Open Source tools with reimplementation of published but proprietary
+prediction methods, antiSMASH manages to provide life scientists with a
+user-friendly web interface and publication-quality illustrations.
+
+This talk will present to the interested non-biologist how the whole process of
+going from sequence information to prediction of produced antibiotics is done,
+requiring as little previous knowledge in mathematics and biology as possible.
+The author will also talk about the differences in developing Open Source
+software in an academic environment as compared to traditional OSS development.
+
+
+
+Bio
+---
+Kai Blin is a computational biologist by trade and Open Source developer by
+passion. During the day he is helping to identify new antibiotics to combat
+diseases. Being more of a network and systems programmer in his spare time,
+the Samba Team member feels lucky to be able to also work on Open Source
+software on his day job.