[Coral-List] ICRS Coral Reef (Gen)omics session

[Miller, David]

We know that many of you coral reef folks out there are hoping to attend ICRS2020, and are now faced with a bewildering array of sessions to submit into, so here’s our pitch for the session that a bunch of us (Iliana Baums, Christian Voolstra, Ira Cooke and I) are co-chairing.

*Session title*: What can we learn about the biology of coral reef organisms from ‘omics-based analyses?

Note that this session sits (not too obviously) under Theme 7 of the ICRS program “Scalable observations and technologies” (http://www.icrs2020.de/program/session-program/#c239).

*Panel*: Christian Voolstra (University of Konstanz, Germany), Iliana Baums (Penn State University, USA), Ira Cooke (James Cook University, Australia), David Miller (James Cook University, Australia)

*Description*: The ever-decreasing cost of high throughput sequencing technologies and their wide application outside of the traditional model organisms has enabled rapid progress in, and new perspectives on, many aspects of the biology of reef organisms, from corals to fish. This session will highlight novel findings from genomic, transcriptomic and metagenomic analyses of reef organisms, and the symbiotic interactions between various components of reef holobionts.

We hope that people working with large molecular datasets on any reef organism from any part of the world will consider submitting abstracts to this session. As has been obvious at the last two ICRS meetings, the extent to which genomic and transcriptomic techniques have been applied in coral reef biology has expanded massively over the last decade, and this trend will inevitably continue. We hope to attract abstracts that not only showcase the state of marine molecular biology, but also enable some lateral thinking about how you might approach your biological question in your favourite organism.

We look forward to hearing from you - please contact any of us with any questions, and we hope to see you there.

Iliana Baums: ibb3 at psu.edu
Christian Voolstra: christian.voolstra at uni-konstanz.de
Ira Cooke: ira.cooke at jcu.edu.au
David J Miller: david.miller at jcu.edu.au