This proposal is a request for partial financial support for a meeting on MOLECULAR CHAPERONES AND THE HEAT SHOCK RESPONSE to be held from May 1- May 5, 2002 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. This meeting is the primary is the premier international format for presentation of new results in this area, and is attended by virtually every Principal Investigator in the field. The explosion of new information on how the folded state of proteins is acquired and maintained in vivo and the involvement of this process in an increasing number of disease states guarantees the excitement of this meeting. Among the highlights of the meeting will be sessions devoted to: (1) amyloid diseases emphasizing the role of alternative folding pathways and increasing evidence for chaperone involvement, with attention to prion protein, polyglutamine proteins and yeast model systems (2) the explosion of structural and mechanistic information on some of the most intensively studied chaperones, (3) the integral role of chaperones in diverse cellular transactions and the signal transduction pathways that integrate them, (4) the crosstalk between protein folding and proteolysis mediated by chaperones. The field of heat shock proteins and molecular chaperones has grown rapidly and draws interest not only from traditional scientific disciplines in the basic sciences but also from numerous areas of biomedical research including neurodegenerative disease, infectious diseases, cancer, and heart disease. The meeting will include seven lecture and three poster sessions. The proposed sessions include: I- Diseases of protein mis-holding, II-Quality control and protein trafficking, III-Cellular response to stress IV-Chaperone function in disease and development V- Regulation of the stress response, VI- Molecular chaperones and proteolysis, and VII-Chaperone biochemistry and protein folding. Each session will consist of eight to nine oral presentations and will be chaired by an invited speaker. A maximum of two additional speakers will be pre-invited per session and the remainder will be selected from submitted abstracts. This balance of talks allows the meeting to feature presentations by leading scientists, to be responsive to exciting new developments, to encourage diverse participation and to recognize new investigators. The subsequent meetings (2002 and 2004) will follow a similar format and will include topics highly relevant to the current research at the time of the meeting.
