The 24th International Mammalian Genome Conference meeting report

The 24th International Mammalian Genome Conference was held on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea on the Island of Crete, Greece. This is an annual meeting organized by the International Mammalian Genome Society (IMGS) (http://imgs.org/; http://www.facebook.com/mammalian. genome). The organizational committee was composed of Joe Nadeau, Rudi Balling, David Galas, George Kollias, and John Lambris, and was advised by the IMGS Secretariat. This year, the conference was attended by over 170 participants representing nearly 20 different countries. The 43 oral presentations were divided among eight sessions, and 89 authors also presented posters during two formal poster sessions. Abstracts are available at http://imgs.org/. Three bioinformatics workshops on using the mouse genome and phenome databases were also offered. Following the workshops, the meeting started with an exciting student symposium where 15 students and postdocs were invited to present their work on a wide variety of topics. Four presentations were selected from the student symposium for presentation at the main conference. The main conference was broken up into eight sessions, including Infection and Immunity; Modeling Disease: Development, Metabolism and Physiology; Large Scale and Genome-Wide Resources; two sessions on Neuroscience, Behavior, and Sensory Systems; and two sessions focusing on Epigenetics, Neoplasia and Aging. In addition, a special session on Human Diseases and Mouse Models focusing on lupus and cancer was presented. The annual Verne Chapman lecture was given by Steve D. M. Brown from the MRC Mammalian Genetics Unit, Harwell, UK, describing his work on mouse models of human middle-ear disease and therapy.