Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia meeting entitled Epigenomics, organized by Bing Ren and Daniel Zilberman. The meeting will be held in Keystone, Colorado from March 29-April 3, 2015. Heritable, covalent modifications to DNA and histone proteins play an important role in an organism's development and survival. Such epigenetic mechanisms have been increasingly linked to risks of a broad spectrum of human diseases. However, the exact function of epigenetic marks in development and disease pathogenesis remains to be better understood. Empowered by recent technological advances in DNA sequencing technologies, epigenetic regulatory mechanisms have been investigated in a growing number of organisms at increasingly high-resolution and scope. The results are an explosion in new genomic technologies, large-scale datasets and computational resources. This growing research field is now referred to as epigenomics. Research in a variety of model systems will be presented, and the conservation and divergence of patterns in different eukaryotic kingdoms will be highlighted. Session topics emphasize integration between epigenomic patterning and developmental regulation, as well as cross-talk between different epigenetic processes. The meeting will also feature cutting-edge, high-throughput technology being developed and applied to understand epigenomes. Opportunities for interdisciplinary interactions will be significantly enhanced by the concurrent meeting on DNA Methylation, which will share a Keynote Address and two plenary sessions with this meeting.
Many genetic diseases and cancers involve inherited changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence - a process called epigenetics. Epigenomics combines epigenetics with genomics, and both of these areas of research have been progressing at an extraordinary pace, however, there are many challenges to investigators working on specific model organisms or disease who want to adopt this approach. The Keystone Symposia meeting on Epigenomics is designed to capture the recent progresses in the field, while bridging the technological gaps in the field, such as datasets availability, metho adoption, data interpretation.
