The 2011 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Conference (CSHL) on Eukaryotic DNA Replication and Genome Maintenance will be held September 1-5, 2011 at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab in Cold Spring Harbor, NY. The meeting has been held every second year since September 1987. This meeting is the only regularly occurring meeting that is exclusively focused on eukaryotic DNA replication. The specific aims for the 2011 meeting include: 1) promote collaboration and bring together scientists interested in all areas of eukaryotic DNA replication and genome surveillance and maintenance, 2) foster discussion for participants in new areas in the field; and 3) provide attendees an opportunity to present data. The meeting will include eight plenary sessions, with each presentation being fifteen minutes long.
Broader Impacts CSHL has an established record of ensuring there is a balance of young scientists and established scientists. Young scientists are encouraged to present at the meetings. In addition, CSHL seeks to ensure underrepresented groups are given equal representation at the meetings. The CSHL meetings and programs are announced via channels that would certainly target underrepresented groups.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Conference on Eukaryotic DNA Replication & Genomic Maintenance September 6–10, 2011 ARRANGED BY Stephen P. Bell, HHMI/ Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joachim Li, University of California, San Francisco Johannes Walter, Harvard Medical School 331 Participants SUMMARY This was the 12th biannual meeting on Eukaryotic DNA Replication and Genome Maintenance held at Cold Spring Harbor. The meeting reflected the remarkable progress that has been made in the past two years and serves animportant role in bringing together researchers studying eukaryotic DNA replication, repair and their cell cycle control. As in the past, this meeting brought together an international cadre of researchers who presented exciting new advances upholding the tradition that this is the most important meeting in the DNA replication field. A total of 331 investigators participated in the ten scientific sessions, with a total of 262 platform and poster presentations. The eight platform sessions were marked by spirited and enthusiastic exchanges of new results. The poster sessions were of very high quality and were overcrowded with interested attendees delving into the findings presented. Sessions at the meeting included: novel approaches to understanding DNA replication; origin selection and helicase loading; responses to replication stress and damaged DNA; origin activation and replication timing; chromatin, cancer and development; replisome function; cell cycle control and connections. The presentations illustrated the growing power of biochemical reconstitution and single-molecule analysis in dissecting the mechanisms of cellular DNA replication initiation and repair. Genome-wide and replication-fork-specific assays showed new promise for understanding the mysterious determinants for origin selection in metazoan cells. The important influences of replication protein abundance, chromosome folding, chromatin structure in the determination of origin activation and replication fork function were reported. In addition, the presentations illustrated our increasing understanding of the close coordination between the DNA repair and cell cycle checkpoints and DNA replication initiation and elongation. Essential funding for the meeting was provided by the National Cancer Institute, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.
