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Tuesday, July 10, 2012 is the deadline for abstract submissions to the
Mouse Molecular Genetics
Conference sponsored by GSA, October 2-6, 2012 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, CA. To view the Plenary Session speakers, or to register for the meeting or make housing reservations (deadline: July 31, 2012) visit the conference website.
You can still register online for GSA’s Yeast Genetics & Molecular Biology Meeting, July 31-August 5, 2012 at Princeton University in New Jersey. Housing and Meal Plan registration is also still being accepted. For highlights of the meeting, including the recipients of the Lifetime Achievement and Ira Herskowitz Awards, and presentations of the Winge-Lindegren Address and the Lee Hartwell Lecture, visit the meeting website.
Thanks to all of those who helped make the recent GSA-sponsored conferences a success, including the Model Organisms to Human Biology conference on cancer genetics and the 10th International Conference on Zebrafish Development and Genetics. Photos from both meetings have been posted to the GSA Facebook page.
The GSA
Journals
Check out the
July issue of
G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, including “A Sequence-Anchored Linkage Map of the Plant–Parasitic Nematode
Meloidogyne hapla Reveals Exceptionally High Genome-Wide Recombination (Thomas et al. 2012),” which presents the most comprehensive linkage map of a parasitic nematode.
GENETICS and
G3 have issued a
call for papers on genomic selection or genome-wide prediction, which uses genotypic information to predict phenotypes, without specific knowledge of individual genes contributing to that trait. For more information, visit the
GENETICS or
G3 websites.
GSA
Members in the News
Congratulations to GSA member and past Board of Directors member (2007-2009)
Victor Ambros (Univ of Mass Med School) and Gary Ruvkun (Mass Gen Hosp) for receiving the 2012 Dr. Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research from Johnson & Johnson “for their co-discovery of microRNAs as central regulators of gene expression and development.” The award includes a $100,000 prize, which will be presented to them this September in New York City.
GSA member
and Fungal Genetics Stock Center curator Kevin McCluskey (Univ of Missouri-Kansas City), along with A. Rick Bennett (Univ of Arkansas) and Seogchan Kang (Penn State Univ), has
received a nearly $500,000 National Science Foundation
(NSF) Research Coordination Grant (RCN)
to form a
United States Culture Collection Network (USCCN), a “network of
ex situ microbial germplasm repositories.” Other collections that will be part of this network include the Pfaff Yeast Collection (Univ of California-Davis) and the National Marine Phytoplankton Collection (Bigelow Lab for Ocean Sciences in Maine). The network goals include establishing a
professional society of culture collection researchers, which
will benefit GSA members via teaching workshops and fostering communication between US and international collections.
Policy
Keep track of the US federal budget appropriations for biomedical and life sciences for Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 with the
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB)
Office of Public Affairs
Budget Tracker table. See how the President’s budget request compares with the House and Senate appropriations or recommendations.
At the end of last month, the
US House Oversight and Government Reform Committee passed
The Government Spending Accountability Act of 2012 (HR 4631), a bill intended
to respond to issues raised by the scandal involving a General Services Administration conference in Las Vegas. Unlike some proposed earlier versions of the bill, HR 4631
does not restrict the number of conferences/meetings federal employees may attend annually and limits the information required to be reported by a government attendee at a conference; however, the bill does require agencies to reduce their travel budgets to 70% of their 2012 level.
All provisions of the bill can be read at the
website.
Several working groups of the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Advisory Committee to the Director have completed their reports, which are now available online. The
Biomedical Workforce report
recommends actions that NIH should take to support a future sustainable biomedical research infrastructure. The
Diversity in Biomedical Research Workforce report recommends actions to address underrepresentation in NIH grants. And the
Data and Informatics report provides guidance on the management, integration, and analysis of large biomedical research datasets.
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