This proposal requests partial support for a Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology (FASEB) summer research conference on Yeast Chromosome Structure, Replication and Segregation. This meeting will be held August 19-24, 2000 at Snowmass, Colorado, as the sixth meeting in an extremely successful biennial series on chromosome research in budding and fission yeast. Research on yeast chromosome dynamics has a substantial impact on human biology, with medical implications in the areas of cancer, cellular aging, and aneuploidy due to chromosome transmission defects. Therefore, this rapidly moving research area requires a dedicated meeting to efficiently disseminate information. Since 1990, the FASEB-sponsored meeting has been the most important clearinghouse for new experimental findings in this field. The 2000 conference program will consist of nine scientific sessions, a keynote address, a workshop, and two poster sessions. The scientific sessions will cover nuclear architecture and chromatin remodeling, DNA replication, cell cycle control and checkpoints, telomeres and position effects, centromeres and their interacting proteins, components of the mitotic spindle apparatus, microtubule motors, meiotic chromosome segregation and chromosome cohesion. The focus of the afternoon- long workshop will be yeast functional genomics, a topic of increasing interest due to the tremendous potential impact on genetic analysis. Ten distinguished scientists have been invited to participate in this conference as session chairs of the nine plenary sessions and the workshop. Dr. Kim Nasmyth (I.M.P., Vienna, Austria), a leader in the field o sister chromatid separation, has been invited to give the keynote address. In consultation with the session chairs, we have generated a list of 104 potential speakers from which we will make a final selection of approximately 66. Most speakers will be invited in Sept./Oct. 1999, while we plan to choose others from among the submitted abstracts prior to the meeting. Participants whose abstracts were not selected for platform talks will be strongly encouraged to present posters. The conference will be limited to 200 scientists who will be chosen on the basis of their interests and expertise, with special efforts to increase the participation of female, minority and junior scientists. Our objective for this meeting is to continue the extremely high level of excitment and scientific excellence that has characterized the past five conferences.
