This proposal requests partial support for an international meeting on Mammalian DNA Repair, a Gordon Research Conference that is held every other year and will be held in Ventura, California, Feb 10-15, 2013. The goals of the conference are to increase our understanding of the mechanisms of DNA repair and signaling and how they influence human health, with particular emphasis on cancer biology and neurodegenerative diseases. The meeting will bring together 37 invited speakers with expertise in all of the major areas of DNA repair and damage responses, including excision repair, double-strand break repair, and mismatch repair, as well as DNA damage-induced signaling and mechanisms of damage recognition at replication forks. We will also have sessions focused on the role of DNA damage response proteins in genomic instability as it relates to cancer, and a few speakers will address translational approaches that utilize DNA repair targets in synthetic lethality approaches. There will be 9 short talks chosen from abstracts, and 4 two-hour poster sessions that will allow all of the participants to interact in an informal setting. In addition, tis is the first year that this conference will also host a Gordon Research Seminar prior to the meeting, February 9 -10, 2013 which is a two-day workshop for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to learn the basics of the field, to have the opportunity to give talks, and t get feedback about their research and their presentations from their peers. The Mammalian DNA Repair GRC is a very significant meeting in this field because of the high caliber of speakers who attend, the intimate scale of the meeting, and the fact that this meeting is widely known as one that propels the research in DNA repair internationally. The application is extremely relevant to human health and disease in its focus on cancer etiology, cancer treatment, neurodegeneration, and aging.
The 2013 Mammalian DNA Repair Gordon Research Conference and Gordon Research Seminar will provide a venue for presentations and open discussions about the relationship between DNA repair and human disease, particularly cancer etiology, cancer treatment, neurodegeneration, and aging.
