CCB: ISMB2005 Alternative Splicing Special Interest Group meeting, June 23-24, 2005, Detroid, Michigan, USA

• General Conference Site: http://biolinfo.org/as-sig/2005/
• Presenters Here is the list of accepted speakers for AS-SIG 2005 (in alphabetic order):
  1. Volker Brendel, Iowa State University, USA
  2. Tom Cooper, Baylor College of Medicine, USA
  3. Xiang-Dong Fu, UCSD, USA
  4. Michael Hiller, University of Jena, Germany
  5. Viive Howell, University of Michigan, USA
  6. Katherina Kechris, UCSF, USA
  7. Roscoe Klinck, University of Sherbrooke, Canada
  8. Chris Lee, UCLA, USA
  9. Ji-Ann Lee, UCLA, USA
  10. Dick Madden, University of Sherbrooke, Canada
  11. Wojciech Makalowski, Pennsylvania State University, USA
  12. Stephen Mount, University of Maryland, USA
  13. Sandy Pan, University of Toronto, Canada
  14. Shoba Ranganathan, Macquarie University, Australia
  15. Ronen Shemesh, Compugen, Israel
  16. Stefan Stamm, University Erlangen-Nurenberg, Germany
  17. Alphonse Thanaraj, EBI, UK
  18. Yi Xing, UCLA, USA
  19. Gene Yeo, Salk Institute, USA
  20. Xiang Zhang, Columbia University, USA
  21. Mihaela Zavolan, University of Basel, Switzerland

   

• About the Workshop

The organizers of AS-SIG would like to invite you to participate in the first ISMB Special Interest Group meeting on Alternative Splicing, on June 23-24, 2005 at Detroit, Michigan, USA. This workshop is scheduled immediately before ISMB2005, June 25-29, 2005 and is jointly sponsored by the RNA Society and ISCB.

AS-SIG follows on from the highly successful Alternative Splicing SIG meeting held at the Pacific Symposium of Biocomputing, 2004.

• Background and Aims

Alternative splicing generates multiple products from a single gene and is a major mechanism responsible for diversity in the transcriptome of higher organisms.

This is an exciting time in the field of alternative splicing, combining new discoveries from genomics, bioinformatics and molecular biology.  Long considered to be an interesting but less common form of regulation, alternative splicing has emerged as a ubiquitous mechanism of regulation, thanks to genome analysis of human and other higher organisms.  Whereas the Human Genome Project has produced a net result of 25,000 – 30,000 genes, alternative splicing evidently produces over 100,000 distinct transcript forms.  Identifying, quantifying and analyzing the regulation, function and evolution of these forms constitutes a “Human Transcriptome Project”, and will require as remarkable and as concerted an effort as the Human Genome Project.  Above all, it will require close collaboration between bioinformaticists and experimentalists, to build a community of shared tools, databases, nomenclature and standards that permit everyone to contribute what they do best, while benefiting from what everyone else has done.  The AS-SIG aims to establish a permanent forum for bioinformaticists and experimentalists to come together in this field.

AS-SIG will address the latest results and questions in this exciting field, and to bring together bioinformaticists and experimentalists, focusing on questions that demand their collaborative inputs.  

Besides oral and poster presentation sessions, the workshop will address the issue of data standards to pave the way for the international efforts directed towards the human transcriptome analysis.

The purpose of this SIG is to cover the latest results and questions in this exciting field, and to bring together bioinformaticists and experimentalists, focusing on questions that demand their collaboration.The SIG will include studies of alternative splicing both in human and other organisms, and will consist of two days of talks (approximately 20 minutes each), and a poster session.

• The meeting sessions will follows; four major thematic areas:

1. Technologies: new experimental approaches for high-throughput discovery, quantification, and functional analysis of alternative splice forms in both mRNA and protein.  These include splice-variant measurement technologies such as microarrays; laboratory protocols/assays; validation techniques; and novel instrumentation platforms.


2. Biology: Biological mechanisms of splicing and regulation; biological functions such as the impact of splice variants on protein structure and biological pathways; phenomena such as nonsense-mediated decay and disease associations.


3. Bioinformatics: algorithms and analysis of alternative splicing, including topics such as analysis of alternative splicing evidence, products, and functional impact; comparative genomics; alternative splicing regulation; and data-mining.
   


4. Databases, Standards, and Community Building for the “Human Transcriptome Project”: our research community is in effect building a catalog of the 100,000+ transcript forms found in human (and other transcriptomes), including their precise structures, products, regulation, functional and experimental annotation.  This massive project, comparable in scale to the Human Genome Project, requires the efforts of the entire community, as well as agreed standards for sharing data, i.e. a common database, data standards, and shared tools.  What data and tool standards do we need?  What nomenclature must we agree on?  How can we unify our efforts via a common database?  How can we integrate data from genomics, bioinformatics and traditional experiments?  How can we enable community annotation, curation and validation?

• Venue, Registration and Accommodation

The meeting will be held at the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center, Detroit, Michigan, USA.

AS-SIG registration will be along with ISMB2005 registration.

ISMB2005 conference rates have been extended to cover pre-conference days required to attend AS-SIG.  For more information on hotels offering special rates, please see ISMB2005 Housing. Hotel reservation will have to be made along with the SIG registration.

• Organizers:
  • Professor Chistopher Lee, Chair, University of California Los Angeles, USA
  • Prof. Shoba Ranganathan, Co-Chair, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
  • Professor Stefan Stamm, Co-Chair, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
  • Dr. Hui Wang, Co-Chair, Affymetrix Inc., USA