This application is for support for speakers and students to attend the comparative functional genomics workshop """"""""Beyond the Identification of Transcribed Sequences"""""""" (BITS) to be held annually at The Jackson Laboratory (TJL) in Bar Harbor, Maine and in alternate years at The Sanger Institute, Hinxton, UK. For the first year in this three-year cycle, the meeting will be held in the U.K. on October 30 - November 2. The objective of this series of workshops is to continue to bring together investigators interested in a wide variety of approaches to functional, evolutionary and expression analysis of eucaryotic genomes. For 14 years, this conference has provided a unique opportunity for established investigators, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students to share technologies, data and ideas on genomics and functional genomics topics, and to develop new collaborations and research opportunities based on these interactions. The generation of the complete genomic sequences of yeast, C. elegans and Drosophila, and the completion of the human genomic sequence and draft sequences of mouse, rat and other genomes provides unprecedented opportunities for gene identification, manipulation and, therefore, functional analysis. The successes of such endeavors hinge, in a large part, on investigators' abilities to access and exploit new and evolving databases and technologies, and on their opportunities to discuss in detail their experiences and needs. It is the primary aim of these workshops to present a broad spectrum of topic areas, from genomic sequence annotation, identification and functional analysis of protein coding and RNA genes, to proteomics approaches and network analyses, and to include large-scale approaches and individual gene descriptions, as well as database development and resource availability. The broad range of topics and investigator interests, plus the small size of the meeting, provides unique opportunities for interaction and in depth discussions.
