Dear colleagues,
Apologies if you receive this message from multiple list servers as we are attempting to reach a wide audience.
Gene Robinson and I invite you to attend and participate in the 11th Arthropod Genomics Symposium to be held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Thursday-Saturday June 7-9, 2018. This annual meeting originated with Susan Brown and colleagues at Kansas State University and now rotates between them, Notre Dame, and us. It is a relatively informal meeting allowing for lots of interactions and discussion of the progress in arthropod genomics in the past year and prospects for the future.
We have retained the format of years before, with a plenary talk by Michael Lynch from Arizona State University on Thursday evening, then six talk sessions on Friday and Saturday each with two invited speakers (see agenda below) and two contributed talks, covering topics such as the i5k, microbiomes, vector biology, social insects, and comparative and population genomics. Each afternoon will have a poster session that does not overlap with the talks.
This is a relatively inexpensive meeting and we provide student residence hall accommodation to help minimize costs, so while we hope that faculty colleagues will attend, we particularly encourage students and postdocs to attend. If you know of labs or colleagues new to arthropod genomics, please forward this announcement to them as they may not be on one of the list servers we have access to.
For those new to genomics, on the Thursday afternoon before the meeting starts we will have a hands-on Bioinformatics workshop covering genome databases (exemplified by i5k Workspace from NAL), the Apollo tool for manual gene modeling, the OrthoDB orthology database, and the BUSCO tool for evaluation of genome assembly and gene set completeness.
On Friday evening we will have an optional dinner with May Berenbaum as speaker, preceded by free tours of the campus with themes of Genomics, Entomology, and Art.
Registration, the meeting agenda, poster abstract submission (including for consideration for a contributed talk if desired), lodging, and travel information can be obtained here<http://arthropod.igb.illinois.edu/welcome>.
Hugh Robertson
