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 July 10-15, 2004 at Callaway Gardens, Georgia, as the eighth 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 2004 conference program will consist of nine scientific sessions, a functional genomics and proteomics workshop, a keynote address and two poster sessions. The scientific sessions will cover chromatin structure and silencing, nuclear architecture and telomeres, networks regulating DNA replication and segregation, checkpoints and genome stability, DNA replication control and mechanisms, mitotic spindle assembly and mechanisms and control of chromosome segregation. Ten distinguished scientists will participate in this conference as session chairs of the nine plenary sessions and the workshop. Kim Nasmyth, the Director of the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, will be giving the keynote address. We will invite 51 speakers and we plan to choose another 18 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 250 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 excitement and scientific excellence that has characterized the past seven conferences.
