How cells control the expression of their genes is a fundamental problem in biology, yet knowledge of how gene expression is controlled remains sketchy, particularly at the "global" level of the whole cell or organism. The last several years have seen rapid advances in the development of new approaches for analysis of each step of gene expression. Many of these approaches involve a computational component in their design or interpretation, and it is clear that effective collaborations between experimental and computational biologists will be required to come to grips with the complex problem of gene regulation. To encourage free cross-disciplinary exchange of existing ideas and expertise, the meeting "Systems Biology: Global regulation of gene expression" will be held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on March 23-27, 2010. The meeting aims to provide a mechanism for the establishment of new collaborations, and a forum for discussing new experimental and computational approaches. Twenty-two speakers of international renown have been invited to give oral presentations, and approximately forty-five others will be selected from submitted abstracts from applicants to the meeting. This is a unique feature of Cold Spring Harbor meetings, and ensures that the scientific exchange is largely about unpublished results. Poster sessions will be included to encourage meaningful participation by the non-speaking attendees. In addition, pre-meeting workshops will be held to familiarize molecular biologists and bioinformaticians with the key concepts, terminology, and acronyms needed to understand each others' disciplines.
Broader Impacts:
Past meetings have attracted a large number of female scientists, students, postdoctoral fellows and early-career investigators, and the current meeting promises to be no exception. One of the two keynote speakers, 25% of the remaining invited speakers, and two of the four meeting organizers are women, and funds provided by NSF will be used to support attendance by student, postdoctoral fellows, and minority participants.
This conference is co-funded by the Genes and Genome Systems and Cellular Systems Clusters.
Organized by: Martha Bulyk, Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School Harmen Bussemaker, Columbia University Marian Walhout, UMass Medical School Brad Bernstein, Mass Gen Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Broad Institute Total participants: 284 Systems Biology aims to understand the emergent properties of molecular networks in cells by using systematic and global approaches. One of the most actively researched areas of systems biology in recent years has been global regulation of gene expression, which coordinates complex metabolic and developmental programs in organisms. The 7th conference on Systems Biology: Global Regulation of Gene Expression, like the ones in previous years, captured the continuing rapid progress and many new discoveries in this young and exciting field. A total of 284 scientists attended the four-day meeting, which featured 46 talks and 109 poster presentations covering a broad range of topics. Two keynote speeches were exciting highlights of the meeting. The first was presented by Dr. Kevin Struhl, who has been a leader in the area of transcriptional regulation for many years. Dr. Struhl presented a detailed story on the transcriptional and epigenetic changes that accompany cellular transformation in a model of breast cancer. The second keynote was presented by Dr. Steve Henikoff, a leader in the field of epigenetics with a long history of creatively integrating systems approaches into his research. Dr. Henikoff presented a global study of the role of histone variants and histone exchange in the regulation of the Drosophila genome. Compared to previous conferences, five aspects featured prominently in this year’s meeting: (1) next generation sequencing technologies, representing increasingly standard means for data acquisition, are now being applied to study transcription factor localization, nucleosome positioning, chromatin modifications and higher-order genome organization; the large amounts of new data have stimulated the generation of a plethora of new genomic methods, computational algorithms, resources and biological insights; (2) new imaging technologies are allowing researchers to examine the dynamics of gene expression in vivo and in real time, and in some cases at a single-molecule level; (3) new resources on the binding specificities of transcription factors and RNA-binding proteins continue to be created, providing opportunities for systematic analysis of gene regulatory networks in Drosophila and mammals; (4) there is much excitement around the newly appreciated and emerging roles for different classes of non-coding RNAs in genome regulation; (5) new computational algorithms are being adopted to analyze the gene regulatory networks. Generally, the speakers in these sessions were young, with most being in the early stage of their careers. Lastly, to help computational biologist and experiment scientists better communicate with each other, this year’s meeting also included a pre-meeting workshop that was focused on introductory experimental and computational topics.
