The workshop has today been discussing cross cutting issues between neurosciences and systems biology. Funnily enough, many of them seem fairly familiar: how to visualise complex, multi-dimensional data; how to combine and standardise the representation of data; how to combine models; how to enable scientists to work cross-disciplinary; and, how to train students to work in the area in the future.

One of the main differences seems to be a cultural differences: if you put two bioinformaticians into a room, they will publish a database; in neuroinformatics this tendency doesn’t appear to be there. I think that part of the reason for this is the lack of an obvious common standard representation. In bioinformatics, we worked from the DNA and protein sequence outward.

Originally published on my old blog site.