The 28th International Mammalian Genome Conference—meeting report

The 28th International Mammalian Genome Conference (IMGC) was held October 26–29th, 2014 in scenic Bar Harbor, Maine. In addition to being the home of The Jackson Laboratory, Mount Desert Island is a popular summer vacation destination. More than 200 attendees of the conference enjoyed the last few days of the tourist season as the autumn leaves fell and the local residents prepared for winter. Darla Miller and Dasha Li Kappe organized the meeting, with the help of local organizers Ron Korstanje, Karen Svenson, Erin McDevitt, and Nancy Place. Scientists presented cutting-edge research in the fields of mammalian genetics and genomics that highlighted the importance of mammalian models for human genetics and disease research. The plenary presentations demonstrated the broad applicability of mammalian models to study a range of topics from gene evolution to rare human diseases. Meanwhile, the Verne Chapman lecture provided a historical account of mouse genetics research and encouraged a new, automated approach to forward genetics. Bioinformatics and Systems Genetics Workshops gave participants hands-on opportunities to become familiar with genetic and genomic tools. A student satellite symposium afforded budding scientists the chance to share their work and two poster sessions encouraged interaction among researchers. The meeting program and abstracts are available online at www.imgs.org/Archive/abstracts/2014Abstracts/IMGS2014Program.pdfwww.imgs.org. Online resources presented at the meeting are listed in Table 1. Table 1 Databases, resources, and tools Bioinformatics workshops Several workshops provided conference attendees with opportunities for hands-on guided tours of publicly available informatics resources relevant to IMGS members. The pre-conference Bioinformatics Workshop offered three mini-sessions: (1) a guide to genome annotations produced by the GENCODE consortium, and differences between annotation sets provided by popular databases (Laurens Wilming, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute); (2) an overview of the International Knockout Mouse Consortium's pipeline and progress (Mark Thomas, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute); and (3) a tour of the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium's database of mutant mouse phenotypes (www.mousephenotype.org). An online link to these workshop powerpoint presentations can be found under the “History” tab on the IMGS home page (www.imgs.org). The System Genetics Workshops, led by Dan Gatti (The Jackson Laboratory), Marty Ferris (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Gary Churchill (The Jackson Laboratory) along with Andrew Morgan and Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) featured talks on the design and status of two important multiparental genetic reference populations, the Collaborative Cross (CC) and the Diversity Outbred (DO) mice. Didactic sessions were supplemented with small-group discussions on rational experimental designs using these populations and available online tools for analyses (www.csbio.unc.edu/CCstatus/index.py) were described by Leonard McMillan, Chen-Ping Fu, and Chia-yu Kao (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). This year's Mouse Genome Informatics(MGI) Workshops (www.informatics.jax.org) were led by Joanne Berghout and David Shaw (The Jackson Laboratory). The hands-on workshops included seminar-style demonstrations followed by the opportunity to navigate MGI using self-guided exercises. Participants were instructed on how to locate biological information by performing a variety of searches, and were also introduced to new tools such as the Human-Mouse: Disease Connection portal (www.informatics.jax.org/humanDisease.shtml), the Recombinase (Cre) Activity portal (www.informatics.jax.org/recombinase.shtml), and the MouseMine computational access platform (www.mousemine.org/mousemine/begin.do). In celebration of the 25th birthday of the MGI database, Janan Eppig (The Jackson Laboratory; O-30) tracked the history of the MGI from a pre-web version distributed on floppy disks to the MGI website (www.informatics.jax.org) that we know today. Janan emphasized the continued commitment of MGI to provide integrated genetic, genomic, and biological data for mouse and to provide increased access to translational data views to support discovery and hypothesis building for studies of human disease. Janan also recognized the contributions of many individuals who worked to develop MGI over the years and described future plans as MGI evolves to meet the growing needs of the scientific community.