The Allied Genetics Conference

NIH RePORTER · NIH · R13 · $50,000 · view on reporter.nih.gov ↗

Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract: The Allied Genetics Conference The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), to be held in April of 2020, will bring together over 4000 investigators from around the world to share recent discoveries and technological advances in genetics and genomics. TAGC is a combined conference of six different model organism research communities: Drosophila, C. elegans, yeast (S. cerevisiae), Zebrafish, Xenopus, and mammalian (mouse), along with the Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics (PEQG) community. The Genetics Society of America (GSA) has long sponsored meetings of these model organism research communities. Those meetings contributed to bringing model organisms to the forefront of biological research, especially in the area of genetics, and fostered the cohesiveness of each community that helped make them so productive. But the complete genome sequences that started appearing about 20 years ago reemphasized the fundamental unity of biology—all organisms are built from essentially the same set of genes. The leadership of the GSA believes these communities should be brought closer together. The sharing of information and the collaborations that will result are sure to lead to a deeper understanding of biology. The GSA brought these communities together in 2016 at the first TAGC. That conference was an aggregation of 7 individual meetings (C. elegans, Ciliates, Drosophila, Mouse, PEQ, Yeast, Zebrafish), with all attendees coming together in 3 plenary sessions featuring well-recognized speakers. But because a majority of attendees told us more of the sessions at the next TAGC should be organized around topics rather than organism, highlighting the unity of biology and rules of life, rather than organized by organism, TAGC 2020 will feature an equal amount of cross-organismal and organism-specific programming. This will bring the communities together around biological topics while still enabling each community to exchange organism-specific information and maintain its identity. In addition to concurrent topical (pan-organism) and organism-specific sessions, the meeting will feature 4 plenary sessions of keynote talks, and additional programming of interest to attendees, especially early career researchers.

Key facts

NIH application ID
10055936
Project number
1R13HG011362-01
Recipient
GENETICS SOCIETY OF AMERICA
Principal Investigator
Henry Mark Johnston
Activity code
R13
Funding institute
NIH
Fiscal year
2020
Award amount
$50,000
Award type
1
Project period
2020-03-17 → 2021-02-28