Meeting Report: The Allied Genetics Conference 2016

The mission of the Genetics Society of America (GSA) is to deepen our understanding of the living world by advancing the field of genetics. A cornerstone of this mission is promoting interaction among geneticists. To foster such connections and collaborations across the field, the GSA brought together seven research communities for The Allied quantitative genetics. In addition to community-specific programming, the groups came together each day for an outstanding series of keynote presentations held in joint plenary sessions. Members of all communities also took part in shared education and professional development events. This report includes highlights contributed by the organizing committees of each community meeting, an update on model organism database news from TAGC, summaries of talks followed by a list of Honors and Awards conferred at the meeting. C. ELEGANS DEVELOPMENT, CELL BIOLOGY, AND GENE EXPRESSION MEETING The C. elegans Development, Cell Biology, and Gene Expression Meeting at TAGC featured a number of presentations that represented significant scientific and technical advances. Like its fellow model systems , C. elegans has experienced a revolution in genetics due to the development of powerful genome engineering techniques. A Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) workshop organized by Mike Boxem (Utrecht University) featured presentations by Alex Paix (Johns Hopkins University), who reported on the use of a highly efficient and versatile recombineering approach for making ge-nome modifications, and a talk by Daniel Dickinson (The University of North Carolina) who described improvements to his streamlined method of using a self-excising drug selection cassette for deriving a transcriptional reporter, a knockout allele, and a translational fusion of any gene, all from a single initial CRISPR-mediated insertion. Meanwhile , Matthew Schwartz (HHMI/University of Utah) addressed one of the more time-consuming aspects of genome engineering: construction of repair templates. Using a Golden Gate Cloning strategy, he developed a system for rapidly building complex repair plasmids from multiple interchangeable subunits. One particularly important application of this approach was the use of the FLP recombinase system for tissue-specific expression of transgenes. Finally, Adam Norris (Harvard University) reported on a dual screenable/selectable marker strategy for the highly efficient production of gene knockouts up to an amazing 11.5 kb. In addition to refinements in genome engineering technology, the meeting ushered in several other technical achievements of note. Worms have lacked several powerful inducible gene expression technologies available in other model systems. Jonathan Liu (California Institute of Technology) developed a Gal4/UAS …