This workshop is dedicated to the memory of Ángel Ramírez Ortiz, scientific investigator of the CSIC and leader of the bioinformatics unit of the Centro de Biología Molecular "Severo Ochoa", who prematurely passed away in May 2008 at the age of 41 after leaving important contributions to the field of structural bioinformatics. We deeply mourn his loss as a collaborator, a mentor and a good friend. The workshop is to be considered as an associate meeting of the annual meetings of the Spanish Bioinformatics community (Jornadas de Bioinformática).

The workshop will be held in Madrid in January 26th-28th, 2009, in the campus of CSIC (c. Serrano 117) .

We aim at bringing together the Spanish bioinformatics community and the international community focused on structural bioinformatics, of which we will invite some key exponents. Our goal is not only remembering and putting in perspective Angel's contributions, but also stimulating the debate on the present state of the discipline and the dialog between the computational and the experimental structural biology communities, as a legacy of Angel's scientific attitude. The workshop will be organized in four sessions, following Angel's main scientific interests: Structural Evolution and Classification of Proteins; Rational Drug Design; Modeling Protein Structures; Bridging Computational and Experimental Structural Biology. There will be moreover contributed talks on other subjects of interest for the Spanish community of bioinformatics.

We reached an agreement for publishing the contributions to the workshop in a special issue of the journal Proteins: Structure, Function and Bioinformatics. The invited contributions and some oral and poster contributions will be selected by the scientific committee after the workshop, and the authors will be invited to submit a manuscript before February 28th, 2009. Acceptance of manuscripts will be subject to peer review.

We acknowledge financial and institutional support from the CSIC, in particular in collaboration with the Comunidad de Madrid, the Centro de Biología Molecular "Severo Ochoa", the  Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, the Instituto Nacional de Bioinformática and the fundación Genoma España, the Red Nacional de Bioinformática, the Red Gallega de Bioinformática, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the Insituto BIFI of Zaragoza, the red BIPEDD of the Madrid Community of which Angel was a key promoter, and from private sponsors, including Silicon Graphics, Lilly, Noscira and Pharmamar.