The Fallen Leaf Lake Conference, held near South Lake Tahoe, California, began in 1985 under the sponsorship of the University of California, Davis to promote and foster advances in molecular microbiology and microbial diversity. The conference for 1998 is titled "Unifying Themes Among Protein and Nucleic Acid Transporters of Bacteria". Gram negative pathogens of plants and animals contain as part of their repertoire of virulence determinants a group of conserved genes. These genes encode protein secretory systems which can translocate their protein substrates directly from the bacterium into the host eukaryotic cell. The translocation is contact-activated. These properties are shared by another class of macromolecular transporters, the plasmid conjugative systems of Gram negative and Gram positive bacteria. In these systems the transporters are responsible for translocating a DNA molecule, as a nucleoprotein complex, from the donor bacterium to a suitable recipient (in the case of Agrobacterium tumefacians, the recipient is a plant cell). This conference will explore recent work from many laboratories suggesting that remarkable similarities exist between these protein secretion and nucleic acid transporters and the genes encoding them. The organizing committee consists of scientists from Europe and the United States. As with all Fallen Leaf Lake Conferences, both established and young emerging scientists participate and interact. With the permission of the authors, the abstracts will appear in a major international journal.
