Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia conference entitled Transcription and RNA Regulation in Inflammation and Immunity, organized by Drs. Silvia Monticelli, K. Mark Ansel, Sarah Teichmann and Gioacchino Natoli. The conference will be held in Tahoe City, California from February 2-5, 2019. The immune system is a heavily armed but carefully tuned defense mechanism that must mount protective responses against invading pathogens, while at the same time avoiding excessive inflammation and inappropriate responses that can lead to severe tissue damage and disease. Properly regulated immune responses are the result of a complex interplay between chromatin modifications, transcription factors and post-transcriptional regulators that operate collectively within each cell to regulate the gene expression programs that control immune cell differentiation, maintenance of cell identity, and the orchestration of functional responses in a dynamic environment. Recent technical advances in genomics and single-cell analyses have brought new ideas and perspectives to investigation of the regulation of gene expression, and our understanding of the mechanisms and regulatory networks that operate in the immune system is advancing at an unprecedented rate. This meeting will be important to define the most impactful questions and future challenges in the field of transcriptional and post-transcriptional control of immune cells, and it will bring together rapidly expanding and evolving communities. The exchange of scientific knowledge and technical capabilities will foster opportunities for collaborations and interdisciplinary interactions among groups of scientists working on disparate aspects of regulation of gene expression in inflammation and immunity, highlighting the latest innovations and discoveries while shaping future directions for the field.
The immune system is a heavily armed but carefully tuned defense that must mount protective responses against invading pathogens, while at the same time avoiding excessive inflammation and inappropriate responses that can lead to severe tissue damage and disease. There is an acute need for a conference with a major focus on transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression in the immune system, including the important roles of epigenetics, microRNAs, long non-coding RNAs and RNA binding proteins. The conference we are proposing has more emphasis on RNA and transcription, thereby bringing together a different community in this area of research and it will favor interactions and advancements in a field that has traditionally been scattered between the general ?transcription? and ?immunology? communities.
