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Integration of Genomic Information Related to Crop Diseases and Pests Workshop20 - 21 October 2008 Dear Associates, The EBI will host a Integration of Genomic Information Related to Crop Diseases and Pests Workshop on the 20th to 21st October 2008. The venue will be Room M203, Murray's Building on the 20th October and the EBI IT Training room on the 21st October. We would like to invite you to attend a meeting hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute focussing on the Agricultural sector. The meeting aims to identify how the commercial and academic opportunities afforded by the sequencing revolution can be realised. The workshop will take place on 20th to 21st October 2008 at EMBL-EBI. It will start mid morning of 20th October and end with lunch on 21st October. See initial agenda below. Motivation: Advances in the understanding of crop pest and disease management have direct bearing on sustainable crop production. Information derived from biomolecular studies builds up our understanding of the life processes of these pests and pathogens. This knowledge is a potent force for the discovery of novel approaches to protect our crops from damage and thereby to increase farm production. The past four years has seen the production of genome sequence assemblies for numerous eukaryotic plant pathogens and invertebrate species closely related to major pests. With the advent of cheaper sequencing technologies comes the prospect of genome sequences being derived for an ever greater number of pest species and key variant strains. Given the great economic and social value of these species, determining their genetic code is certainly a great step forward for research. Extracting value from these data in terms of building understanding of the comparative biochemical systems in these species is a major undertaking. It is clear that co-ordination of the comparative annotation of their genomic information will be absolutely required to attain breakthroughs in research goals. Strategic funding of the delivery of genomic information of relevance to the biomedical sector has resulted in the production of the Ensembl environment. Ensembl’s technical capabilities have enabled the comparative annotation of a large number of vertebrate species. Ensembl’s view of collated genomic information has become a de facto standard from which life scientists can draw value from reference genome sequences. With the rising tide of genomic information relating to pest species, it is viewed that an equal endeavour should now be applied to genomes of relevance to the Agricultural sector. It is of long term strategic importance to European Agricultural research and farm production that: The meeting will be held at the European Bioinformatics Institute between interested parties from academia, commercial enterprise and industry. Purpose: The purpose of this meeting will be: Key discussion topics include: • What approaches are currently being made in the community to create reference annotation of genome sequences of invertebrate pest and fungal crop pathogens? The Coordinator of the EBI Industry Programme is Dr. Dominic Clark (EMBL-EBI). Please send any questions regarding the strategic intent and programme to Dominic Clark (clark@ebi.ac.uk). We are grateful to Dr. Michael Csukai and Dr Katie Cook (Syngenta Ltd) to Prof. Chris Rawlings (Rothamsted Research) and to representatives of the BBSRC for helpful input on the programme and agenda. Agenda:
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