AS-SIG/About

About the Workshop

The organizers of AS-SIG would like to invite you to participate in the 5th Special Interest Group meeting on Alternative Splicing (AS-SIG), on July 18-19, 2008 at Toronto, Canada. The workshop is running under the title

"Towards elucidating the splicing code"

and is scheduled immediately before ISMB'08. AS-SIG'08 follows on from initial and subsequent successful Alternative Splicing SIG meetings held at the Pacific Symposium of Biocomputing 2004, and the ISMB in 2005, 2006, and 2007.

Background and Aims

THE PROCESSING of precursors to mature mRNAs (pre-mRNA splicing) constitutes a critical mode for the regulation of gene expression. The choice of splice-sites is conspicuously often not constitutive but variable, as splice sites are often differentially selected, giving rise to multiple mRNA products and consequently different protein isoforms with different biochemical and/or physical properties. Splicing is a highly regulated mechanism, requiring the precise recognition of canonical splicing signals and additional splicing cis-regulatory elements to remove the introns and produce the correct message. Furthermore, it produces isoforms specific to different cell or tissue types, as well as to different stages of cell differentiation or development, and integrates with other components of RNA processing and quality control pathways. Alternative splicing plays also a crucial role in many cellular processes, including sex-determination and apoptosis; and a variation in either cis-acting elements or trans-acting factors can lead to aberrant splicing and cause a disease state. A picture emerges in which the control of gene expression is thought of as a complex network of interactions at the level of transcription, as well as at the levels of RNA processing, export and surveillance.

ALTERNATIVE SPLICING (AS) is positioned at the interplay of genomes, regulatory networks and evolution, and it has emerged as a ubiquitous and dynamic mechanism of gene regulation. This is supported by a stream of new insights and discoveries derived from the fields of genomics, bioinformatics and molecular biology, as well as new approaches toward more parallel measurements of expressed isoforms across cell types and tissues. Identifying, quantifying, analyzing and understanding the regulation, function and evolution of AS constitutes a decisive part of Human Transcriptome, to eventually arrive at a cis-RNA of AS in model organisms. This will require close collaboration between computational and experimentally-inclined researchers, enabling us to build a community of shared tools, databases (nomenclature and standards), that permit everyone to contribute what they do best, while benefiting from what everyone else has done.

THE AS-SIG meeting is evolving as a permanent forum at ISMB for splicing regulatory biologists, as well as for biologists in related fields, to discuss collaboratively, by addressing latest findings and open questions in this exciting field, and bringing together bioinformatics and biology on a systems level. The AS-SIG meeting will include studies of AS of both humans and model organisms, reflecting the added biological value of comparative genomics. The location of ISMB'08 in Toronto, Canada, provides an excellent opportunity for attracting scientists from North America and will therefore facilitate to broadening the scope of the AS-SIG as well as interactions with the international AS community.

Session topics

Session 1, Post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression
Model systems, from yeast to human; mRNA isofoms, conservation and divergence; expression and regulation of tissue- and developmental stage-specific genes; RNA processing (including and ends, decay, editing, and antisense); evolution, splicing/alternative splicing, exon shuffling, intron gain and loss; RNA regulatory maps, determination of cis-functional elements active in splice site choice; high-throughput, sequencing and microarrays; platforms: annotation, storage, and data exchange formats

Session 2, Protein structure, functional impact, and interactions
Interaction, splicing factors and their interaction with cis-regulatory functional elements; function, impact of isoforms on protein structure and function; RNA quality control, scope and action of NMD; chemogenomics and small-molecules-protein interactions

Session 3, Splicing and RNA pathogenesis
Identification, classification and characterization of cryptic splice variants linked to disease in human and model systems; disease, tools and strategies to detect pathogenic splice variations and to restore authentic and/or suppress disease-associated variants

Poster session

Conference dinner