DRAFT PROGRAM

of

Plant and Animal Genome XVII Program

January 10 - 14, 2009

Welcome to the draft program for the Plant & Animal Genome XVII conference.

Details of the last meeting, PAG-XVI, can be found on the PAG-XVI Home Page.
The abstracts from all the previous fifteen meetings are available via the Internet from this computer system at: [http://www.intl-pag.org/PAGarchives.html]

The abstracts from these past meetings appear on the menu and have been indexed for convenient searching.

Abstracts for the PAG-XVII meeting will be available one month prior to the start of the PAG-XVII meeting. The abstracts will be released on Wednesday, 10 December 2008 and can be found by clicking here.

Based on ongoing and very helpful feedback from participants, the organization and structure of the PAG-XVII has again been slightly changed and improved. At the request of organizers, workshop schedules have been changed to reduce conflicts and increase attendance in these sessions. This home page for the meeting is an overview of the main parts of the meeting. The PAG Table of Contents now links to the information about the meeting and its various parts (e.g., workshops, sessions, travel grants, and so on). This page will only contain an overview of the meeting.

The Organizing Committee would like to thank all those participants of the PAG-XVI meeting who took the time to fill out the conference evaluation form. PAG-XVII will again have the main lecture room that easily seats well over 2500 people and we will have even larger rooms for all workshop leaders that request the additional space. At PAG-XVI there were over 2100 attendees (excluding over 200 exhibitors) and PAG-XVII is expected to have an attendance again of well over 2100, assuming the visa problems for overseas attendees from certain countries will not be the problem they were in the past few years.

As with the PAG meeting last year that are there are NO LATE EVENING WORKSHOPS! The last workshop will end by 8:20 pm during the week and by 6:00 pm on the weekend. No more 10:30 pm workshops! This has been accomplished by reducing the length of a workshop to two hours and ten minutes. The organizing committee is also adding specific times to each presentation, and working hard with workshop organizers to assure these times are kept, so attendees can go from one workshop to another and know exactly what talk is being presented at a specific time. PLEASE let the organizing committee know of any workshop leaders who do not keep to the printed schedule so the organizing committee can take the necessary steps to be sure the program times are properly adhered to by all.

We are continuing to start the meeting on Saturday and the banquet will continue to be held on Wednesday evening. Starting with PAG-XV a plenary lecture was initiated and will be held just prior to the Sunday night reception. There will no longer be a poster session held in conjunction with the Sunday night reception. The odd & even numbered poster sessions will be held on Monday morning and afternoon. Posters will be put up starting on Saturday morning, giving attendees ample time to view the posters. Each poster session will be 105 minutes = 1 3/4 hours long. There are eight (8) plenary lectures - one Sunday before the reception, three (3) main plenary lectures on Monday morning/afternoon, and two (2) each on Tuesday and Wednesday. The time slots after the first two Tuesday and Wednesday lectures are now being used for additional workshops and to rearrange the schedule to reduce similar type workshop content overlap.

The current schedule for PAG-XVII has well over 100 workshop and industry vendor presentations and computer program demonstration sessions. New workshops for PAG-XVII include Recombination - mechanisms and consequences for genome structure, plant epigenomics, animal epigenetics, and Cacao.

We have a travel agent Rinis Travel, to help attendees with their travel.

We have added an Exibitor Search Engine to the PAG web site. You can search for information and products by keyword. Click here to access this search facility.

Again the organizers will pass out evaluation forms towards the end of the meeting for participants to fill out. This year the form is again on the web so you may send in your comments and evaluations after you get home. The form is available by clicking here.

Friday - January 9, 2009:

Speaker Ready room is open 12:00 Noon - 8:00 pm

Saturday - January 10, 2009:

Workshops -
All Day Workshops:

8:00 am - 6:00 pm