Greetings, Please excuse this email if you have received it more than once. I am writing to invite your participation in a new conference workshop on Alternative Splicing that is being added to the upcoming Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, Jan. 6 - 10, 2004 at the Fairmont Orchid Hotel, Hawaii. In addition to the originally planned Alternative Splicing session on the morning of Jan. 7th, we are adding a full-day session with talks covering four major topics in alternative splicing (listed below), on Jan. 6th. Thus we will have two consecutive days of presentations and discussion about alternative splicing, at the beginning of the conference, and participants will have the rest of the conference to continue their discussions informally. Our purpose is two-fold: to cover the latest results and questions in this exciting field in greater detail than was possible during the PSB main session, and to provide a workshop forum for productive discussion between researchers from the biological, computational and statistical fields. Indeed, one major hope for the extended session is that we will be able to create a critical mass of interest for organizing a conference on alternative splicing that would bring together all three of these groups on a regular basis. Talks during the extended workshop will be grouped in four major areas, covering material including (but not limited to): Technologies: Splice variant-related measurement technologies, such as existing microarray platforms; laboratory protocols/assays; validation techniques or novel instrumentation platforms. Biology: Biological mechanisms of splicing; biological functions such as the impact of splice variants on biological pathways; phenomena such as nonsense-mediated decay and disease associations Bioinformatics: Algorithms and analysis for splicing variant discovery; comparative genomics; computational methods for identifying cis-acting elements, trans-acting elements, alternative promoters etc. Databases & Community Resources: Data storage, access, mining, open source databases, standardization, consortium, database for validation and knowledge-based annotation and curation etc. We would like to invite you and your colleagues to submit abstracts to present a talk or poster in the extended workshop (http://www.bioinformatics.ucla.edu/~info/PSB <http: www.bioinformatics.ucla.edu="" ~info="" psb=""> ). The deadline for the submissions is Nov 18th and we will notify you of acceptance by Nov 25st. Space is limited, so we encourage you to submit your abstract as soon as possible. Please feel free to forward this inforamtion to anybody who might be intereseted. Note: the registration for the workshop is free. However, you should register for the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing ($625 - $775); this is necessary to receive the lower conference room rate from the hotel. The PSB organizers have been very helpful and generous in enabling us to add this workshop to the PSB, and we think there will be much benefit from bringing biologists and bioinformaticists together to discuss the exciting developments in alternative splicing. For full information and registration for the PSB, go to http://psb.stanford.edu <http: psb.stanford.edu=""/> . Yours Sincerely, The Organizers of the PSB Extended Workshop on Alternative Splicing Hui Wang Chris Lee Ueng-cheng Yang John Blume [[alternative HTML version deleted]]