CONFERENCE PROPOSAL: CILIATE MOLECULAR BIOLOGY

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application seeks partial financial support for the "Tenth International Meeting on Ciliate Molecular Biology," which will be held as a FASEB Summer Research Conference at the Vermont Academy in Saxtons River, Vermont, from July 19-24, 2003. The meeting will bring together 160-170 researchers from a variety of countries 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 discovery 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, including humans. This meeting seeks to bring together investigators from these various fields that are united by their use of ciliates as models, in order to foster the efficient exchange of unpublished research results and technical advances. Ten platform sessions will be held at the conference, along with two workshops and two poster sessions. The topics of the platform sessions represent active areas of current ciliate research, including "Chromatin Structure and Function," "DNA Replication, Repair, and Telomeres," "Cytoskeleton and Cell Motility," "Protein Trafficking and Regulated Secretion," and "Evolution and Population Biology." In addition, there will be a session on "Genetics, Genomics, and Molecular Technology," as well as a workshop on "Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics." Similar events at the 2001 FASEB conference on Ciliate Molecular Biology were instrumental for the planning of ciliate genome sequencing efforts, which are now coming to fruition. The session and workshop at the 2003 meeting are intended to further plan and develop bioinformatic and post-genomic resources for ciliates, as this would further increase the value of these model organisms for investigating fundamental biological problems of broad relevance.