Report on DOE support for GSC13 travel award

Abstract

Consortium. The 3-day conference was held at the Kingkey Palace Hotel, Shenzhen, China, on March 5-7th, 2012, and was hosted by the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI). The meeting was entitled ‘From Genomes to Interactions to Communities to Models’ and aimed to be a scientific meeting that highlighted the role of data standards associated with genomic, metagenomic and amplicon sequence data, and the contextual information associated with the sample that data was generated from. To this end the meeting focused on genomic projects for animals, plants, fungi and viruses, metagenomic studies in host-microbe interactions, and community dynamics in microbial communities. In addition the meeting hosted a Genomic Observatories Network session, a GSC biodiversity working group session, and a Microbiology of the Built Environment session sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The meeting was very well organized by the local hosts at BGI, and all attendees reported that they were very happy with the outcome, service and quality of the science presented. Highlights were keynotes by Rita Colwell, Mitch Sogin and Jim Tiedje. The 5 attendees paid for by the DOE award were Daniel Smith and Jared Wilkening (University of Chicago); Patrick Chain (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Austin Davis-Richardson (University of Florida) and Greg Caporoaso (University of Northern Arizona). Each attendee was able to either present or become involved with the attending scientists, and each reported that they had got something significant out of the meeting. Here are detailed their personal accounts of the GSC13 meeting. We thank DOE for the helping to fund this valuable outreach initiative, and for supporting the attendance of these bright young scientists at this important meeting.