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The first Agricultural Microbes Genome conference will be held on January 13-14 in the same venue, with an anticipated attendance of 150. Claire Fraser of the Institute for Genomic Research will give the plenary lecture on "Microbial Genome Sequencing: New Insights into Physiology and Evolution."
Darrin Scherago, meeting manager at Scherago International, said the conference has been growing about 28 percent each year since 1996. Last year’s meeting brought in 1,340 people. The larger crowds may be a result of the increases in agricultural research funding from government organizations such as the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Agriculture, he guessed.
In addition to about 40 workshops, there will be more than a dozen lectures including talks on Arabidopsis, the functional genomics of zebrafish, and chips for genotyping, mapping, and gene expression. Speakers will include Charles Cantor of Sequenom, Robert Lipshutz and Elizabeth Kerr of Affymetrix, Gary Karpen of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Dani Zamir of the Hebrew University, Pamela Green of Michigan State University, Edward Rubin of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and William Talbot of Stanford University, among others. In an expanded exhibit hall this year, 68 exhibitors and 84 booths will be double the number present in 1999.
--Matt Dougherty