Intellectual Merit. The 2012 FASEB Summer Research Conference on Virus Structure and Assembly will be held from June 10 to June 15, 2012, at the Vermont Academy, Saxtons River, Vermont. The meeting will be devoted to discussions of state-of-the-art findings on virus structure as it relates to the mechanisms of virus induced processes such as entry, assembly, and nucleic acid packaging, and their host interactions during the infectious process. The assembly of an infectious virus is a complex process that requires the coordinated activities of numerous macromolecules of both viral and host origin. Viruses provide excellent models to understand basic mechanisms at near atomic resolutions that will have broad implications to biological systems in general. This is best achieved by a multi-disciplinary approach that includes genetics, molecular biology, cell biology, and structural, biochemical and biophysical approaches. The theme of the 2012 conference is "Virus Molecular Machines". Discussions will focus on the basic mechanisms of entry machines, assembly machines, genome packaging machines, and so on. The talks will emphasize the convergence of genetics, molecular virology, cell biology, biophysical virology, and structural virology in the study of many viral systems, many serving as important models to understand biological phenomena and others with medical relevance. Invited speakers will present diverse approaches used to study the critical steps involved in virus entry, exit, assembly, and host interactions. In addition, the conference will address cutting edge developments in the areas of virus structure determination, such as single particle electron microscopic image reconstruction, tomography, asymmetric reconstruction and single molecule approaches. This multi-faceted conference will serve as a forum for integration of research findings from many viral systems towards fundamental understanding of the events in the viral life cycle, from the initial host cell receptor attachment and entry, cellular trafficking, genome replication, virion assembly/genome packaging, to interaction of viruses with the host immune machinery.
Broader Impacts. The conference will engage young investigators, students, post-doctoral fellows, women and under-represented minorities in the cutting edge areas of virus structure and assembly. For the first time, special initiatives are planned for to foster direct scientific exchanges between senior investigators and graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. These include special sessions on "Meet the Experts," "Cutting Edge Technologies," and "Networking" that are geared to these participants. There will also be many opportunities for young scientists to present and discuss their work. Short talks chosen from the abstracts will be part of the plenary sessions and these will be given by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Poster sessions will allow for in-depth discussion of the presented data with scientists from multiple disciplines. Finally, the small size of the conference and the large amount of discussion time provides a wonderful opportunity for young scientists to have extensive interactions with more senior researchers.
The 2012 conference on Virus Structure and Assembly emphasized the convergence of structural virology with cell biology, biochemistry and genetics; three disciplines used to study virus entry, exit, and host interactions. The underlying theme for the 2012 Virus Assembly conference was "Virus as a Macromolecular Machine". This meeting included outstanding researchers from around the world presenting cutting edge research directed towards a fundamental understanding of how virus assembly and virus structure dictates the mechanisms of the virus life cycle. The conference participants included scientists at all stages of their careers as well as participants from industry. There were 177 attendees, 63 (36%) of whom were women. 59 (33%) graduate students and 30 (17%) post-doctoral fellows attended, representing 50% of the participants. The remaining 50% of the attendees were faculty from around the world. The conference began on Sunday evening with two keynote speakers introducing the major concepts of the conference. The main plenary sessions consisted of invited speakers giving formal 30 minute presentations and "late breaking development" short talks selected from submitted abstracts. The presentations were thematically presented in nine sessions: 1) Virus machines: structure and mechanics, 2) Entry machines: attachment and initial steps, 3) Entry machines 2: mechanism, 4) Intracellular machines: trafficking and replication, 5) Genome Packaging Machines, 6) Assembly machines 1: protein-protein interactions, 7) Assembly machines 2: host cell interactions, 8) Exit machines: budding and lysis, and 9) Virus: an evolution driving machine. Fifty-one speakers gave oral presentations; forty-one of these speakers were invited as formal presenters and 29% of these speakers were women (12 women, 29 men). More junior scientists, post-doctoral fellows and graduate students, were selected to give shorter "late breaking" talks. Of ten short talks, nine were by graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and three of these by women. Scientists outside of US/Canada gave nine of the invited talks. None of the invited speakers had given session talks at the previous meeting. All the presentations were followed by a discussion period, allowing time for a full consideration of questions from the audience. Discussions were moderated by nine invited session chairs, three of whom were women and two were from an institution outside the US or Canada. Due to the high percentage of student attendance and the desire to give their work additional visibility, a Graduate Students Session with eight additional short oral presentations was held on Monday afternoon. The session was chaired by two graduate students. All eight speakers were students whose abstracts were chosen due to the high quality of their work. Four of these speakers were women with one from an institution outside the US or Canada. This was the first time a graduate session was included in this conference and from the comments received, it was a huge success. In addition to the oral presentations, 122 attendees presented their research in one of three formal poster sessions held late in the afternoon. These presentations were given by attendees from all levels; junior and senior faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students. In sum, virtually all of the 177 attendees participated by presenting original research, most of it unpublished, which testifies to the very dynamic nature of the meeting. As the conference venue includes on-site housing and meals, extensive informal interactions were fostered and constantly occurring throughout the meeting, and most afternoons were also free for such discussions. To further promote such interactions, "meet the speaker" tables were organized (first time in this conference), where students and postdocs met plenary speakers during breakfast, lunch and dinner to discuss the research presented in the talks. Finally, a major strength of this meeting was the interaction between animal virus and phage biologists who each seek to identify the similarities and differences in their respective systems, thus generating unique inquiries. Funding to support this meeting was obtained from a number of sources including the FASEB Summer Research Conferences, NIAID, Office of AIDS Research, and the National Science Foundation, Gilead, FEI Company and Biocomp. Funds were used to defray speaker registration expenses, provide travel awards for all short talk and graduate student session speakers, and to provide refreshments during the meeting breaks and poster sessions. A business meeting was held following session seven. There was unanimous agreement to hold the next conference in the summer of 2014 with a majority of participants voting to keep the meeting at the Vermont venue. Keeping to our tradition of having one co-chair represent animal viruses and the other phage biology, Carolyn Teschke (Univ Connecticut), and Adam Zlonick (Indiana Univ) will be joined by Rebecca Craven (Penn State Med School) and James Conway (Pittsburgh Med School) as co-Vice chairs to lead the upcoming meeting.
