Workshop : Frontiers in Genomics: Insights into Protist Evolutionary Biology, to be held on May 19-21, 2004 in Iowa City, IA.

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A grant has been awarded to Dr. Debashish Bhattacharya at the University of Iowa to organize a workshop entitled, "Frontiers in Genomics: Insights into Protist Evolutionary Biology", followed by a symposium at the annual meeting of the Society of Protozoologists entitled, "Genome Evolution in Microbial Eukaryotes". Dr. Laura Katz at Smith College is co-organizer of these special meetings. The specific aims of the workshop are to define the role of genomics in resolving the deepest nodes in the eukaryotic tree of life, to identify challenges in characterizing protist genomes, and in proposing specific solutions to these challenges. The findings of the workshop will be disseminated through a peer-reviewed publication and online resources that will provide a description of appropriate mechanisms for training future scientists in the area of protist genomics. The ensuing symposium will be a public forum that will consist of invited lectures from experts in the field of protist genomics that will provide the community with an update on the emerging data as well as information on appropriate genomic tools to use in the future. In addition, there will be a poster session to highlight the work of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdocs. The proceedings of the symposium will be published as an edited volume to faciliate the broadest distribution. Protists constitute the bulk of eukaryotic diversity yet protist genomes remain relatively unexplored. The research community is now moving out of the model organism stage of genomic sequencing and the power/importance of comparative genomics is becoming apparent. Work on protist genomes is, however, hampered by a lack of understanding of protistology among genomicists and vice versa. The workshop and symposium will bridge these two groups by bringing together expertise in protist diversity, genomic data collection, and bioinformatics to spur protist genomic research and protist evolutionary biology from a genomic perspective.