This project provides partial funding for the "Genomic Approaches to Transcriptional Regulation Conference", to be held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, March 6-9, 2003. The meeting will focus on unraveling the regulatory information that controls the activation and repression of genes involved in developmental, metabolic, and environmental responses. Traditionally, investigators have studied this problem by analyzing the DNA-binding preferences of specific transcription factors, and/or the cis-regulatory elements that control the expression patterns of single genes. These studies have tentatively identified DNA sequence motifs for around one hundred transcription factors, and have led to the idea that transcriptional regulation at the genome level involves a complex interplay between modular DNA sequence elements such as enhancers, silencers, insulators, and basal promoter elements. Despite this progress, there is still much to learn about the mechanisms that control the transcriptional repertoire within an individual cell. Because of the scope of this problem, researchers have begun to refine traditional experimental approaches and invent new ones. Many of these approaches involve a computational component in their design or interpretation. Other strategies have evolved from the availability of several complete genomic sequences and the prospects of many more to come. It is clear that effective collaborations between experimental and computational biologists will be required to grapple with this complex problem. Thus this meeting will be organized so as to permit a free cross-disciplinary exchange of existing ideas and expertise. It is hoped that this meeting will provide a mechanism for the establishment of new collaborations, and a forum for discussing new experimental and computational approaches.
