The MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS)

website (http://www.mcbios.org/) has been updated and transitioned to a faster

server. We apologize for any problems that you might have been experiencing

in registering for the First Annual Conference (Nov. 14-16) at UALR and

UAMS.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) seminar on their

GenBank and molecular biology tools will be held at UAMS on Sunday, Nov. 16,

following the two-day conference. You can now register for this workshop at

the http://www.mcbios.org/ website (see the link on the right-hand side of the home

page) without having to register for the conference (though we'd love to

have you do both). Due to space limitations, we can only handle the first

98 participants at the seminar.

This also is a reminder that the deadline for submission of an abstract (250

word maximum) is October 1, 2003. Abstracts should represent original,

unpublished work and may be presented at MCBIOS either orally or as a

poster. You will be notified within two weeks of the abstract deadline

whether your proposed topic is acceptable for official presentation.

Authors who request a presentation that is not scheduled as part of the

program, may be granted permission to submit a poster instead.

All authors of accepted posters and presentations that are given at the

conference will be eligible to submit a manuscript for peer review following

the conference (actual deadline for manuscript submission will probably be

mid-January 2004). After a peer review process, accepted papers will be

included in the proceedings of the society's conference. We are currently

investigating options for having these papers published as well by a

bioinformatics journal.

On behalf of the Program Committee, we encourage you to submit an abstract

to support our upcoming conference. Remember, this is a prerequisite if you

wish to submit a full article for publication in the premier issue of the

society's proceedings later on this year.

Thank you,

Steve Jennings

Conference Chair