QECG 2010 - Home

Home　 　People　 　Program　 　Schedule　　 Application　 　Poster　　 Travel Information　 　Contact us 　 Links 　　 English | 日本語

The theme of the 2010 Summer School is the phenomenon of strong (or extreme) sequence conservation, which will be explored from a quantitative and multidisciplinary perspective, and connections forged with parts of biology outside of genomics.

Sequence conservation forms the basis of comparative genomics, has already played a pivotal role in biology and medicine, and is likely to become increasingly important in the eras of abundant sequence data and the personalized genome. Ultra-conservation has led to a broad appreciation of the need for a reevaluation of how the action of selection is inferred from sequence comparison. It has raised basic questions about the character of "neutral drift," calling for new quantitative developments that may be facilitated by the cultures of mathematics, physics, computer science, and engineering; however, this pursuit - and the interpretation of genome sequence in general - ought to be firmly grounded in its biological context.

With a multitude of whole-genome sequences now publicly available, ultra-conservation is trivial to exhibit, but so far difficult to explain. Therefore it represents an ideal topic for a combined Summer School and Workshop, where the phenomenon can be appreciated by participants of diverse backgrounds, who can then bring their own perspectives to bear on the problem.

Broad Topic Categories:

• Ultra-conservation: Theory & Experiment.
• Ultra-conserved Elements (UCEs) within Populations.
• Comparative, Evolutionary and Population Genomics.
• Recombination and Genome Rearrangement.
• Neutral and Adaptive Evolution: Proteins, RNA, Regulatory Sequences, Genomes.
• Experimental Evolution.

The format of the summer school consists of a three-hour presentation in the morning, with coffee breaks, followed by an hour or two of discussion in the afternoon. The summer school is aimed primarily at introducing approximately forty students and post-docs with quantitative backgrounds - not necessarily in biology - to the splitting edge of contemporary comparative and evolutionary genomics research. As such, tutorials will be offered to get participants with less-developed quantitative skills or sparse biological background up to speed insofar as possible; however, we hope that presentations will be intense and self-contained.

We are looking for a set of students with a broad range of backgrounds, experimentalist and theorist: for example, biology, chemistry, computer science, ecology, engineering, evolution, genomics, mathematics, medicine, or physics. The essential prerequisite is an enthusiasm to overcome traditional boundaries of your own field of specialization. A small number of researchers at later stages of their careers may be invited to participate, particularly if we believe they can contribute to mediating the interdisciplinary dialog; such applicants should be certain to address this explicitly in their applications. OIST is strongly committed to the advancement of women in the sciences, and women are especially encouraged to apply.

Okinawa is a subtropical divers' paradise of diverse ecology and distinctive beauty and cultural flavor.

OIST provides summer school students with accommodation at Seaside House and financial support for their travel. Students will be selected competitively based upon their completed Applications, submitted by February 19, 2010 to qecg2010#oist.jp (replacing the "#" by "@" of course).

Confirmed Lecturers

• Nadav Ahituv, UCSF: Functional characterization of evolutionarily conserved non-coding sequences.
• Peter Arndt, MPI Berlin: Dynamical models describing nucleotide evolution.
• Gill Bejerano, Stanford: Ultra-conservation: the hip and the hype.
• Emmanouil Dermitzakis, Geneva: Population genomics of gene regulation.
• Takashi Gojobori, National Institute of Genetics, Japan: Genomic evolution of the neural system.
• Ueli Grossniklaus, Zurich: Landscape and comparative genomics in plants - a tale of adaptation, extinction and ultra-conservation.
• Jotun Hein, Oxford: Recombination, the ancestral recombination graph and pedigrees.
• H.C. Paul Lee, NCU Taiwan: Quantitative genome evolution.
• Jonathan Miller, OIST: Ultra-duplication.
• Nancy Moran, Arizona: Genome reduction in genomes of symbiotic bacteria.
• Erik van Nimwegen, Basel: Quantitative laws of bacterial evolution.
• Howard Ochman, Arizona: The simplicity and complexity of bacterial genomes.
• Anirvan Sengupta, Rutgers: Long-range regulation: enhancers and insulators.
• Gasper Tkacik, U. Penn: From statistical mechanics to information theory: tools for understanding biophysical systems.
• Byrappa Venkatesh, IMCB Singapore: Evolution of Hox gene clusters in vertebrates.
• Ting Wu, Harvard Medical School: Ultra-conservation from the standpoint of genome integrity: from copy-counting to meiotic gene silencing.