Conference: 2012 FASEB Summer Research Conference on Virus Structure and Assembly to be held at the Vermont Academy, Saxtons River, Vermont

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Intellectual Merit. The 2012 FASEB Summer Research Conference on Virus Structure and Assembly will be held from June 10 to June 15, 2012, at the Vermont Academy, Saxtons River, Vermont. The meeting will be devoted to discussions of state-of-the-art findings on virus structure as it relates to the mechanisms of virus induced processes such as entry, assembly, and nucleic acid packaging, and their host interactions during the infectious process. The assembly of an infectious virus is a complex process that requires the coordinated activities of numerous macromolecules of both viral and host origin. Viruses provide excellent models to understand basic mechanisms at near atomic resolutions that will have broad implications to biological systems in general. This is best achieved by a multi-disciplinary approach that includes genetics, molecular biology, cell biology, and structural, biochemical and biophysical approaches. The theme of the 2012 conference is "Virus Molecular Machines". Discussions will focus on the basic mechanisms of entry machines, assembly machines, genome packaging machines, and so on. The talks will emphasize the convergence of genetics, molecular virology, cell biology, biophysical virology, and structural virology in the study of many viral systems, many serving as important models to understand biological phenomena and others with medical relevance. Invited speakers will present diverse approaches used to study the critical steps involved in virus entry, exit, assembly, and host interactions. In addition, the conference will address cutting edge developments in the areas of virus structure determination, such as single particle electron microscopic image reconstruction, tomography, asymmetric reconstruction and single molecule approaches. This multi-faceted conference will serve as a forum for integration of research findings from many viral systems towards fundamental understanding of the events in the viral life cycle, from the initial host cell receptor attachment and entry, cellular trafficking, genome replication, virion assembly/genome packaging, to interaction of viruses with the host immune machinery.Broader Impacts. The conference will engage young investigators, students, post-doctoral fellows, women and under-represented minorities in the cutting edge areas of virus structure and assembly. For the first time, special initiatives are planned for to foster direct scientific exchanges between senior investigators and graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. These include special sessions on "Meet the Experts," "Cutting Edge Technologies," and "Networking" that are geared to these participants. There will also be many opportunities for young scientists to present and discuss their work. Short talks chosen from the abstracts will be part of the plenary sessions and these will be given by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Poster sessions will allow for in-depth discussion of the presented data with scientists from multiple disciplines. Finally, the small size of the conference and the large amount of discussion time provides a wonderful opportunity for young scientists to have extensive interactions with more senior researchers.