This proposal seeks support for the meeting on """"""""AUTOMATED IMAGING AND HIGH TRHOUGHPUT"""""""" to be held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory April, 2012. The meeting will assemble leaders in the field, together with junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, to discuss the latest advances that make use of imaging for high throughput phenotype acquisition. This area is at the forefront of efforts to map genotype to phenotype. One of the major unresolved problems in biology is the relationship between genotype and phenotype. To accurately map genotype to phenotype will require detailed population-level information about both. While we will soon have the ability to rapidly determine the complete genomes of individuals in a population, we are limited by our ability to characterize their phenotypes. Efforts to address this disparity focus on increasing the throughput of phenotype acquisition. This usually involves the development of automated imaging capabilities. By their very nature, efforts in this field are highly interdisciplinary as tey bring together experimentalists, engineers and researchers from a range of quantitative disciplines. The meeting will include sessions on single cell phenotyping, developmental phenotyping, organ(ismal)/behavioral phenotyping, microscopy and technology, data mining, modeling, management, and visualization. Each session will be chaired by a leading scientist in the field. Oral presentations will be selected from submitted abstracts by the session chairs in consultation with the organizers. Selected speakers will include graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty aiming for maximal inclusion of young investigators. Of special importance are the two poster sessions, where many participants can present their work in an atmosphere conducive to informal discussion. Additional senior investigators will be invited to highlight important or rapidly moving areas. The meeting will be of moderate size and we expect about 200 people to attend, the vast majority of whom will be presenting a poster or talk.
It will soon be possible to determine the genome sequence of an individual rapidly and inexpensively. How the information in the genome translates into changes in the functioning and appearance of an organism (which constitutes its phenotype) is far from clear. Phenotypic changes resulting from differences in the genome can be beneficial or harmful. In the case of human disease, there is much to be learned about how changes in different genes affect disease susceptibility. To understand how information in the genome maps to modifications in the phenotype will require the development of high-throughput means of measuring phenotypes. Because many phenotypic features of interest can be visualized, new and enhanced imaging techniques combined with automated imaging capabilities are at the vanguard of this emerging field. Research in this area brings together experimentalists, engineers and researchers from a range of quantitative disciplines. A meeting is proposed to be held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in April 2012 entitled, """"""""Automated Imaging &High-Throughput Phenotyping"""""""" that will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scientists to discuss cutting edge approaches and findings in this field.
