Monday, June 02, 2008

Fear and Loathing in Boston for the ASM Meeting


OK

Here is my confession.  I hate,  I mean hate, big meetings.  If a conference has more than 200 people I start to feel icky.  And now this AM I head off to Boston for the gigantic ASM "General Meeting".  I am in part dreading the whole thing.  Anytime one needs to use an online planner to schedule which talks one might want to go to, it is not really my kind of meeting.

But, I was invited to give the "Division R" lecture.  Division R is the "Systematics and Evolutionary Microbiology" section of ASM and this year they are having a session on "Linking evolution of protein families to genome annotation efforts."  This is right up my alley as it was for genome annotation that I first started working on phylogenomic methods (and for which I coined the phrase "phylogenomics") (e.g., see my 1998 paper in Genome Research for more detail on this and see my 1995 paper on SNF2 proteins in NAR where I first discussed using evolutionary trees to predict gene function).

And since the meeting is in Boston (where I was born), I agreed to go.  Add I am sure I will see some great things there.  But travel and I do not agree well right now and I am I guess dreading the whole thing.  If you want to learn more about phylogenomics go to the division R session (Kimmen Sjolander, Patricvia Babbitt, and Margrethe Serres are also talking). And I will try to blog from the meeting but we shall see ...

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