This proposal requests partial funding for the Gordon Research Conference on Myogenesis for the year 2001. The Myogenesis Gordon Conference meets every third year. By informal community agreement, it alternatives with Keystone/Asilomar and EMBO meetings in a three year cycle that provides one major international meeting for scientists in the area per year. Within this framework the Gordon Conference emphasizes skeletal and cardiac muscle develop during embryogenesis and regeneration. This Gordon Conference has been very successful and influential. One way that it has achieved its success is to select each year one or two especially timely topics to introduce to its audience, in addition to provide a forum for new discoveries within its core topic areas. For 2001 the two new areas of emphasis will be stem cell biology and genomics. Stem cells from various source tissues in embryos and adults are a hot topic cutting across many biological disciplines for reasons of fundamental interest and for its implications for cell-based therapeutics. Dr. Guilo Cossu, whose work opened the way into a reconsideration of stem cell sources with myogenic potential is meeting vice-chair, and he will lead this session. We have also recruited Prof. David Anderson, a leading international figure in stem cell biology of the nervous system, to give the keynote talk. He is also the leader in studying genes that are the nervous system equivalents of MyoD. The second new session for 2001 will inform this community about resources, methods, and discoveries in genomics and functional genomics. This is very timely, since the human genome draft sequence will be complete and the mouse draft should then be nearing completion. An important current challenge for the investigators in this field in how they will use these data and the new methods that are being developed for whole genome biology in the context of myogenesis. This is the expertise of the 2001 meeting chair, Dr. Wold.
