Lecture cycle	THE CENTRAL DOGMA AND BEYOND	Joint
Date	Jun 14-17, 2009
Organisers	Otto Hagenbüchle, Nouria Hernandez, Winship Herr and Jerzy Paszkowski
Site	Eurotel Villars, CH-1884 Villars-sur-Ollon
Theme	The central dogma of biology as formulated by Francis Crick is quite simple: The stable genetic information DNA is transferred to RNA and subsequently proteins, which do all of the work. Once the information has passed into RNA and then protein, it cannot get out again- it cannot be changed. F. Crick (Oct.1956) This dogma has still an important place in biology, but has been challenged more and more in recent years. During the Villars meeting 2009, leading scientists will give an overview of the discoveries that were made over the last 50 years, which show that the flow of information is much more complex than initially thought. RNA can function as genetic information, and the informational content of DNA can change between different cell types (e.g. VDJ joining, chromatin elimination). RNA is not always the precise linear copy of DNA; its content can be changed by posttranscriptional editing, splicing and trans-splicing events. In addition RNA can also have catalytic (e.g. splicing, rRNA, telomerase) and regulatory (e.g. miRNA, ncRNA) functions which were originally thought to be the tasks of proteins. Even at the level of proteins, protein splicing can change the informational content and proteins can alter their function by changing their conformation (e.g. prions).
Requirements	Each participant must present a publication in the framework of a Journal Club session. Speaker’s list: The scientific program, will be announced by posters and on the web (http://www.3eme-cycle.ch/biologie or http://www.cuso.ch) For additional information please contact: OTTO HAGENBÜCHLE e-mail: Otto.Hagenbuchle@epfl.ch Tel. 021 692 39 10
Deadline	May 20, 2009
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