DRAFT PROGRAM

of Friday, 28-Apr-2000 19:59:47 EDT

Plant & Animal Genome VIII Program

January 9 - 12, 2000

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

PLEASE NOTE THE REVISED DATES FOR THE MEETING - THE MEETING WILL END ON WEDNESDAY EVENING.

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

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

Abstracts for the PAG-VIII meeting will be available prior to the PAG-VIII. The abstracts will be released on 9 December 1999 and can be found by clicking here.

Based on feedback from participants the organization and structure of the PAG-VIII has been changed. 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 main change for PAG-VIII is that the meeting will end after the banquet on Wednesday evening, January 12, 2000. There will be an Agricultural Microbes Genome I meeting directly after the PAG meeting. The Agricultural Microbes Genome I meeting will last 1 1/2 days from January 13-14, 2000. Details of this meeting can be found by clicking here. Reduced registration rates will be available to those who attend both meetings.

The Organizing Committee would like to thank all those participants of the PAG-VII meeting who took the time to fill out the conference evaluation form. The one comment that was, again, most often mentioned was the lack of space/seats at many of the workshops. Every year the Organizing Committee plans for a bigger meeting and obtains larger rooms/more seats for most workshops, based on the requests from each Worskhop leader. Every year it seems our optimistic projections are exceeded. We believe we have been able to resolve the problem by expanding the overall meeting space the conference uses at the hotel. For PAG-VIII we will be moving the posters and exhibits downstairs into a much larger area. This will free up all the space on the main floor. We will a main lecture room that easily seats 2000+ people and we will have larger rooms for all workshop leaders that request the additional space. At PAG-VII there were 1340 attendees and PAG-VIII is expected to have an even larger attendance.

In response to the many constructive suggestions from PAG-VII participants, the meeting organization has been further modified in a number of places. The main changes are that the meeting will after the banquet on Wednesday evening, Monday evening will be a free night, and there will be only two afternoons for posters. There will fewer lectures, and there will be separate, parallel plant and aminal sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday after the main plenary talks on those days.

At PAG-VIII we will have over 10% more poster talks than at the last PAG meeting. A few new workshops have been added including Brassicas, Polyploidy, Forage & Turfgrass, Transcription Profiling, and Use of Molecular Markers by Plant Breeders. For PAG-VIII there will be 42 workshop and vendor presentations, as well as a number of computer program demonstrations.

As usual there we will pass out evaluation forms towards the end of the meeting for particpants to fill out. This year we have also put the form on the web so you may send in your comments and evaulation after you get home. The form is available by clicking here.

Saturday - January 8, 2000:

8:30 am - 5:30 pm