This award is for support of a US delegation to attend a U.S.-Pakistan Workshop and Symposium on Genomics and Computational Biology to be held in Lahore, Pakistan in October 16-19, 1997. Leading the US delegation are Dr. Lawrence Grossman, of Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Richard Roberts, Director of Research, New England Biolabs in Beverly, MA. The Pakistani co-organizer is Dr. Sheikh Riazuddin, Director, the National Center of Excellence in Molecular Biology at the University of Punjab in Lahore. The symposium will be attended by scientists and graduate students from Pakistan and several neighboring countries. The topics will include: DNA sequencing efforts in C. elegans, rice, humans, H. influenza and other organisms. Separate sessions will be devoted to the computational analysis of sequence data, the identification of genes associated with major genetic diseases and/or traits of economic importance. The US participants will conduct separate visits to research facilities in this field in universities and government laboratories in the Lahore area. The workshop is intended to identify research areas of common interest and to assess the potential for joint research in this emerging field. Scope: The research projects that would be recommended in this meeting could be done successfully in Pakistan, since they do not entail expensive facilities, other than computational equipment, and since Pakistan could provide basic population biology information, and can also make intellectual contributions in the processing and interpretation of the data. The topic of the workshop is important to the United States and to Pakistan. The American P.I. and co-PI are eminent scientists. The Pakistani scientist was responsible for establishing the National Centre of Excellence in Molecular Biology. His activities have strengthened collaborative research between American and Pakistani scientists, especially in areas where the Pakistani side complements the capability in the United States, such as by providing new enzymes, or by doing extensive data collections or experiments. Research in computational biology should be one additional area for beneficial complementary cooperation. It is planned to include at least one woman scientist, and one junior scientist within the US delegation. This proposal meets INT objective of increasing U.S.-foreign collaboration in areas that benefit both sides, and in enhancing junior scientists' international experience.
