Mittelerde Meeting 2019

For two days J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth was located at the BIOTEC Dresden. On June 13/14, 2019 bioinformaticians and computational biologists gathered for the 4th Central German Meeting on Bioinformatics, called the “Mittelerde Meeting 2019” hosted by Prof. Michael Schroeder.

The tradition started back in 2011, when the first meeting was held in Jena with the goal to bring together the computational biology of central Germany. Since 2017 the meeting is called “Mittelerde” and gained more and more attention from outside its original audience.

With over 90 registered participants, this year’s “Mittelerde Meeting” was a great success and covered research from diverse fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. Beside the research groups from central Germany, including Leipzig, Halle, Jena, Freiberg, and Mittweida, the program contained invited talks of international top scientist. With over 17,000 km Prof. Peter R. Wills from the University of Auckland had by far the furthest journey to Middle-earth.

Talks were contributed by scientist from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), the neighboring Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD), Belgium’s top-ranked university KU Leuven, the University of Cologne, and Bayer AG. The attendees got answers to some really hard questions: Which was first? DNA or the machinery to read it? How to bar code millions of drugs? What are the dangers of swimming in the Elbe?

The event was complemented by a scientific speed dating session, where each of the participants got the chance to socialize with scientists from other research domains and exchange ideas. Finally, the ring of “Mittelerde” was passed to Prof. Stefan Schuster (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena) to continue the tradition next year according to J. R. R. Tolkien’s statement: “Someone always has to carry on the story.