AS-SIG

ISMB2006 Alternative Splicing Special Interest Group meeting
August 4-5, 2006

Plenary Speaker: Prof. Gil Ast, Tel Aviv University, Isreal

About the Workshop

The organizers of AS-SIG would like to invite you to participate in the second ISMB Special Interest Group meeting on Alternative Splicing, on August 4-5, 2006 at Fortaleza, Brazil. This workshop is scheduled immediately before ISMB2006, Aug. 6-10, 2006 and is jointly sponsored by the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil and ISCB.

AS-SIG 2006 follows on from the highly successful Alternative Splicing SIG meeting held at the Pacific Symposium of Biocomputing, 2004, and the ISMB2005 AS-SIG meeting.

Background and Aims
Alternative splicing generates multiple products from a single eukaryotic gene and is a major mechanism responsible for diversity in the transcriptome of higher organisms, using combinations of "genes in pieces" to assemble transcripts.

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 discuss collaboratively what needs to be done in transcriptomics.

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 have a panel discussion on 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.

Sessions will focus on the following major themes:

    1. 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.

    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. Splicing and Diseases: Identification and characterization of splice variants as a consequence of disease; diagnostic tools and therapeutic stratagies based on splicing pattern variations between normal and diseases states; classification of splice forms based on disease progression.

    4. Databases, and Standards for the “Human Transcriptome Project”: Transcript repositories; data interchange formats; standards for annotating the transcriptome.
 
Venue, Registration and Accommodation
The meeting will be held at the Fortaleza Convention Center, Fortaleza, Brazil.

AS-SIG registration will be along with ISMB2006 registration.

ISMB2006 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 ISMB2006 Housing. Hotel reservation will have to be made along with the SIG registration.


Organizing Committee