The fifth biennial Salk-Caltech Conference on DNA Replication and Genome Integrity will be held at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, July 18-July 22, 2008 and henceforth in even years. The conference will provide up to 350 places for students, postdocs, professors and biotechnology researchers to meet and discuss novel findings of the past year. Due to its West coast location, increased participation from West coast and Pacific labs is expected. The conference is designed to fulfill the need for an annual conference on this topic generated by the rapidly increasing activity in this field. Advances in this area are continuing to impact significantly on issues related to human health, including the etiology, diagnosis and treatment of cancer, aging, and myriad diseases related to development, the immune system, and neural degeneration. The underlying theme of the meeting will be consideration of genomic instability, to encourage a deeper understanding of links between cellular replication and repair systems. Outstanding researchers have been invited to serve as chairs in sessions devoted to Initiation, Fork proteins, Recombination, DNA Repair, Checkpoints and Genome Integrity, Telomeres, Chromatin Structure and Epigenetics. These chairs will provide in-depth introductions to the most important concepts and unresolved problems in each field. All other presentations and attendees will be chosen from abstracts to ensure that the forefront of research is presented and to encourage active participation of younger researchers. Experienced staff of the state of the art Salk Conference Center will administer the meeting. Scientific organizers are Geoffrey Wahl and Matthew Weitzman, of the Salk Institute, Judith Campbell, California Institute of Technology, Susan Forsburg and Oscar Aparicio of Univ. of Southern California. This conference complements intellectually, temporally, and geographically the current biennial DNA replication meeting held at Cold Spring Harbor in odd-numbered years. In summary, the meeting is designed to significantly broaden discussion of the most topical issues confronting eukaryotic DNA replication. In particular, the West Coast venue should provide an additional option for students and postdocs who have been unable to attend East Coast conferences due to the greater cost. Participants' reviews of the first four meetings confirm its great success. ? ? ?
