O'Really?

Genomes to Systems is a biannual conference held in Manchester covering the latest post-genome developments. Here are some brief and incomplete notes on some of the speakers and topics from day one of the 2008 conference.

1. Andrew Cossins, University of Liverpool, opened the conference
2. Nobel laureate Robert Huber gave a talk on serine proteases, (on the 20th anniversary of winning the nobel prize for determining the three-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre he must be getting a bit bored of giving talks about it!)

Session one: Deep Mining of Genomes

3. Tom Gingeras, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (formery Affymetrix), discussed three different models (intragenic, intergenic and interleaved transcript model) of genome organisation and architecture in a talk titled Genome-wide transcriptional mapping of functional elements and regulatory strategies
4. Greg Elgar, Queen Mary University of London talked about Functional analysis of highly conserved non-coding DNA
5. Manolis Dermitzakis, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute discussed causes of regulatory variation in the human genome
6. Sam Griffiths-Jones, University of Manchester talked about Genomic analysis of microRNA transcription, including miRBase: the home of microRNA data
7. Plenary lecture by John Mattick, University of Queensland the eukaryotic genome as an RNA machine, everything we know is wrong! The central dogma of molecular biology is misleading, RNA plays a much more significant role in the information economy of the cell.