9600629 Kleckner and Mizuuchi The purpose of this Workshop is to assemble for discusqions essentially the entire community of scientists who are working on the biochemical mechanisms of site-specific recombination and transposition at an "aggressively mechanistic" level. This interrelated group of reactions lie at the heart of a number of very important biological processes: integration of retroviruses, generation of antibody diversity, transmission of antibiotic resistance genes and rearrangements of chromosomes. The analysis of these reactions requires understanding and applications of many scientific disciplines including protein biochemistry, biochemical kinetics, chemistry, DNA topology and genetics, and the level of scientific analysis and expertise within the relevant community is very high. The scientific program includes studies of retroviral integration, prokaryotic transposons, site-specific recombinases of the integrase and resolvase families, immunoglobulin rearrangements and accessory host factors as they pertain to these reactions. In addition, the program includes studies of chemical catalysis in other types of protein/DNA reactions so that observations in the field can be placed in a broader context. Finally, the meeting includes several talks on "model systems" studies which are outside the field but are outside the field but are directly relevant with respect to the types of questions being asked and/or the types of methods being used to address questions mf interest. The meeting will be limited to 135 participants. This number is sufficient to include all of the principal investigators who are working productively in this area as well as many post-doctoral fellows and some graduate students. Essentially every attendee either speaks or presents a poster. This meeting has become the intellectual focal point for this field and is unique in the degree of interchange amongst participants at both formal and informal levels. ***
