A conference entitled "Virus Assembly" will be held under the auspices of the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology (FASEB) from July 26 to July 31, 1992, at the Vermont Academy, Saxtons River, Vermont. This will be the second such conference, the first being held in 1990. Although considerable progress has been made in defining the mature structure of animal and plant virions, much less is known of the intracellular processes directing the assembly of newly synthesized macromolecules into infectious highly organized virion particles. These processes are likely to be virus specific and so targets for therapeutic intervention. Some recent findings have included the role of chaperonins in structural protein maturation, phosphorylation of viral structural subunits, non-conservation of symmetry in polyoma, and interference of the products of cloned genes with virus infection. Such results led to the organization of the first FASEB conference on "Viral Assembly" in 1990 as it was realized there was and urgent need to examine and integrate the current knowledge of intracellular assembly of infectious virions. The urgency arose from the fact that the last relevant conference was held over seven years previously (EMBL, 1982). The 1992 FASEB conference will be build on the success of the 1990 conference in bringing together leading investigators in the fields of assembly and maturation of animal, plant and bacterial viruses. A particularly important and well-received feature of the 1990 conference was its organizations of sessions around specific processes and problems in virus assembly, rather than around particular viruses. This led to an interchange and merging of knowledge from research workers in the fields of animal viruses and bacteriophages. Until the advent of the FASEB meetings, these communities had grown apart and so had no common forum. Poster sessions, in addition to the oral sessions, will ensure an even wider communication of results among attendees and guarantee that late-breaking or newly-developing investigations will be adequately covered. A new feature, suggested by many 1990 participants, will be the availability of abstracts for the posters.
