Rossant 9723102 Funds are requested for partial support of the 13th International Congress of Developmental Biology, to be held at Snowbird, Utah, July 5-10, 1997. This meeting represents an important opportunity to bring the international community of developmental biologists to the United States and should allow unparalleled opportunities for international and interdisciplinary interactions. This meeting is being organized by the Society for Developmental Biology and replaces the annual meeting of the Society for 1997. It is co-sponsored by the International Society of Developmental Biologists, which coordinates the ongoing series of International Congresses held in different countries every four years. The meeting will have 600-800 registrants and will provide opportunities to hear the latest work from international leaders in the field, as well as from younger scientists, whose work will be chosen for oral presentation from the abstracts. There will be two poster sessions, allowing everyone a chance to present their work to an international audience. The topics of the plenary sessions have been chosen to represent some of the most exciting areas of current developmental biology research, including signalling pathways in development, neural patterning, lineage analysis, asymmetries and segregation of determinants, gene regulation, development and evolution, and organogenesis. Multidisciplinary approaches will be emphasized and speakers will be drawn from those working on a wide range of systems, including plants and animals. Continuing the success of issue-oriented workshops at the recent annual SDB meetings, the participants will hold workshops on education, funding, and future directions in science, drawing on the wider perspective provided by the international audience. The enthusiastic response to our invitations to speak at this meeting and the interest already generated in the community promise to make this a highly successful gathering. Developmental biology research is at an exciting stage where fundamental discoveries in many different systems are coming together to provide an integrated view of developmental organization across evolution. This Congress provides a timely opportunity to survey the state of the art and provide directions for the future.
