Symposium: Building Bridges from Genome to Phenome: Molecules, Methods and Models, Austin, TX; January 3-7, 2020

College Of Charleston, Charleston SC

Investigators

Abstract

This award will support a symposium, "Building Bridges from Genome to Phenome: Molecules, Methods and Models," at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting in Austin, Texas, Jan. 3-7, 2020. The oral and poster presentations and related activities will cover a broad range of scientific efforts to understand how genes can shape species-specific characteristics while also giving rise to individual variation. Understanding the mechanistic basis by which genes give rise to both stability and variation in phenotypes is one of the Grand Challenges articulated by NSF. Scientists in many disciplines are taking a wide variety of approaches to dissect the mechanistic bases by which genes give rise to phenotypes, called genome-to-phenome studies. The goal of this Symposium will be to build connections among the most successful of these research efforts, as well as to identify key gaps and future needs to accelerate and facilitate this critical area of research. Activities of the Building Bridges Symposium are designed to encourage and support presentations and participation by established and new investigators, as well as postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate researchers representing diversity in gender and ethnicity, and with expertise in the wide range of disciplines represented within SICB. Taken together, the Symposium activities aim to facilitate rapid and insightful progress toward understanding the processes underlying constancy and variation, making it possible for species to be resilient in a changing world. Presentations from the Symposium, and a summary paper resulting from the Symposium and associated activities, will be widely disseminated via publication in the SICB journal. The Symposium is organized by members of the NSF-supported Animal Genome-to-Phenome Research Coordination Network (AG2P RCN), which was established five years ago. The AG2P RCN's first symposium and policy workshop were conducted at the 2016 SICB Meeting. The white paper resulting from that workshop emphasized the need to standardize and lower the barriers for analysis of transcriptomic data, so that scientists from many disciplines and research environments could develop consensus approaches for the "taking-off point" for linking genomic with phenotypic diversity. Since 2016, there has been a huge proliferation of experimental organisms as well as of large and complex datasets describing various levels of biological organization, all aiming to elucidate aspects of the genome-to-phenome framework. The 2020 Building Bridges Symposium aims to identify and bridge gaps in this framework and the most promising future directions for genome-to-phenome research. In addition to oral and poster presentations, the Symposium includes an introductory session to initiate exchange of ideas and contact information, (2) a Twitter feed to gather comments from SICB members regarding major barriers to integrating data across disciplines, levels of organization and models, and (3) a policy workshop to outline a white paper identifying major gaps, key barriers and leading edges in the field of genome-to-phenome research. The Symposium and related activities will use an interdisciplinary collaborative model that will provide meaningful professional and scientific development opportunities as well as formal and informal opportunities for participants to network with each other across disciplines, gender, ethnicity, and professional ranks. All presentations in the Symposium will be published in the SICB journal and thereby will be widely disseminated and have abroader impact on the field. This conference is being co-funded by the Integrative Ecological Physiology and Physiological Mechanisms and Biomechanics Programs within NSF-BIO-Integrative Organismal Biology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.