Conference: FASEB Ciliate Molecular Biology Conference, to be held in Saxtons River, Vermont, Summer 2003

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The "Tenth International Meeting on Ciliate Molecular Biology" will be held as a FASEB Summer Research Conference at the Vermont Academy in Saxton's River, Vermont, July 19-24, 2003. The meeting will bring together an international group of 160-170 researchers who employ molecular approaches for investigating diverse biological problems using ciliated protozoa as their model system. Historically, work on ciliated protozoa has provided a number of remarkable insights into important and universal biological processes, including the discoveries of self-splicing RNA, telomeres and telomerase, and chromatin remodeling by histone acetyltransferases. The continued development of molecular tools for these organisms has made them favorable models for studying numerous biological processes shared with a wide variety of eukaryotic organisms. This meeting seeks to foster the efficient exchange of unpublished research results and technical advances. Ten platform sessions and two poster sessions will be held at the conference. The topics of the platform sessions represent active areas of ciliate research, and include "Chromatin Structure and Function", "Genome Organization and Reorganization", "DNA Rearrangement: Epigenetics and Chromatin", "DNA Replication, Repair, and Telomeres", "Genetics, Genomics, & Molecular Technology", "Cytoskeleton andCell Motility", "Protein Trafficking and Regulated Secretion", "Morphogenesis and Development", "Environmental Sensing & Behavior", and "Evolution and Population Biology." There will also be two workshops held in conjunction with the conference. The first will focus on "Ciliates in the Classroom". Ciliated protozoa have long been used as teaching tools because of their complex biology, large size, and simple culture requirements. Many conferees have developed teaching modules (primarily for undergraduate courses) that utilize ciliates. The workshop will provide a forum for exchanging such teaching tools, discussing programs that work, and stimulating the development of new approaches to effective undergraduate education. "Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics", will be the focus of the second workshop. A similar event at the 2001 FASEB conference on ciliate molecular biology was instrumental in the planning of ciliate genome sequencing efforts. The session and workshop at the 2003 meeting are intended to further develop the ciliate genome sequencing efforts, as well as to plan for bioinformatic and post-genomic resources for ciliates. Past work on ciliates has contributed greatly to many areas of biology, and the further development of genomic-based resources will assure that these organisms remain useful and popular models for investigating fundamentalbiological problems.