From Genomes to Interactions to Communities to Models

March 4th-7th 2012, Shenzhen, China

On behalf of GSC13 steering committee, it is our great honor to invite you to attend the “The 13th Workshop of the Genomic Standards Consortium” organized by the BGI, to be held from March 4th-7th 2012, in Shenzhen China.

The 13th Workshop of the GSC is an open meeting aimed at widening the circle of researchers, industrial and policy representatives who employ and get involved with the GSC. The meeting will be focused on megasequencing projects, those that leverage the extended capability of advanced next-generation sequencing technology to generate trillions of base pairs of sequence data. Specifically the meeting will be looking at how the reporting standards designed by the GSC can be used to help improve capture of contextual metadata associated with the sequence data. In addition we will have policy discussions focused on the power of these datasets, new efforts to provide discussions forums for globally distributed ecosystem analysis sites, current developments in the Earth Microbiome Project, and advances in indoor microbiome research.

As the main conference organizer, BGI (http://www.genomics.cn/en) has established its own technical platforms based on large-scale genome sequencing, efficient bioinformatics analyses, and has abundant experience in metagenomics research as well as in plant and animal genomics research, among others. BGI has been one of the leading genomics institutes in the world.

We are confident that, with your active participation, the workshop will be a scientifically rewarding and enjoyable experience, providing opportunities to promote genome research by active communication and collaborative networking between disciplines and continents.

The BGI conference team (meeting@service.genomics.cn) will do their best to assist your stay during the meeting and inform you the detailed schedule. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

We look forward to meeting you in Shenzhen!

GSC13 local organizer: BGI, China

The Genomic Standards Consortium (http://gensc.org)

The Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) formed in September 2005 to work as an international community towards solutions for improving the descriptions of our complete collection of genomes and metagenomes and mechanisms of data exchange and integration. It is an open-member international community consisting of biologists, bioinformaticians, and computer scientists, with representatives from NCBI, EMBL, DDBJ, JCVI, JGI, EBI, Sanger, and a number of other institutions involved in cross-cutting research. As a first step, the GSC published the “Minimum Information about a (Meta) Genome Sequence” (MIGS/MIMS) specification, which describes the core information that should be reported with each new genome or metagenome publication. Meanwhile, MIGS/MIMS has been extended to cover marker genes as well through the “Minimum Information about a Marker Sequence” (MIMARKS) specification. The GSC is now building several core implementation projects on top of this family of MIGS/MIMS/MIMARKS standards. The GSC has hosted 11 workshops to date and is currently running GSC 12 in Germany and planning GSC 13 in China as the momentum behind this initiative continues to build.

The GSC has also launched on Open Access, online journal, Standards in Genomics Sciences (SIGS) that received seed funding from the Michigan State University Foundation in July 2008. A principal objective of SIGS is to further the GSC data standardization efforts. Publication of SIGS began in July 2009 on a bimonthly schedule and has already achieved an international following of readers in more than eighty countries. SIGS is a member of CrossRef and participates in the forward linking program. Articles appearing in SIGS are archived in PubMed Central and all content is available through the PubMed Central site, as well as the SIGS site.

March 4th-7th 2011 (Registration on March 4th)

Kingkey Palace Hotel, Shenzhen, China.

Rita Colwell (University of Maryland, USA)

Jun Wang (BGI, China)

Dawn Field (CEH, UK)

Jack Gilbert (Argonne National Labortaory, USA)

Neil Davies (University of California-Berkley, USA)

Mitch Sogin (Woods Hole MBL, USA)

Jeffrey Siegel (University of Texas, USA)

Scott Kelley (San Diego State University, USA)

Jason Stajich (University of California-Riverside, USA)

Junjie Qin (BGI, China)

Linda Amaral Zettler (MBL, USA)

Jeroen Raes (VIB, Belgium)

Mitchel Sogin (MBL, USA)

Janet Jansson (LBNL, USA)

Frank Oliver Glockner (Max Planck Institute, Germany)

The deadline for abstract submission is 0:00(Beijing Time), Feb. 10th, 2012. All abstracts will be peer-reviewed by the Committee, and authors will be notified if they are selected to give an oral presentation. Accepted abstracts will be published in the Workshop Proceedings.

Registration fee

Standard Rate: $400/￥2400

Student Rate: $300/￥1800

The registration fee covers conference material, food and beverage during the conference sessions.

Meeting Organization Group

Tel: +86-755-25273340/25273092

Fax: +86-755-25273092

Email: meeting@service.genomics.cn