British yeast group meeting

A Biochemical Society Independent Meeting held at the Barcelo Cardi� Angel Hotel, 17–19 March 2009 �The British Yeast Group 2009 (BYG2009) meeting was organized by Dr Nicholas Kent and hosted by the Cardiff University School of Biosciences. BYG has run annually for 32 years, drawing researchers from the UK, Ireland and the wider EU who use yeast species to study biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology. �This year, 105 delegates from 38 different institutes attended. Full programme details are available at www.byg2009.cf.ac.uk. �The last few years have seen a surge of discoveries in basic molecular biology, genome dynamics and evolution which have utilized both yeast genetics and high-throughput analysis. � This year’s choice of invited speakers and the distribution of offered presentations reflected this trend. � The meeting began with a session exploring recent work co-ordinated by Ray Waters and Simon Reed (Cardiff University) utilizing microarray technologies to probe mechanisms of genome-wide DNA repair. New insights into the generation and processing of DNA breaks during DNA replication and recombination were explored in a session led by Matthew Whitby (University of Oxford), and the role and maintenance of telomeres in both budding and �fission yeast systems was discussed in the session led by Julie Cooper (Cancer Research UK, London Research Institute). Kim Nasmyth (University of Oxford) presented stunning images of chromosome segregation in a session which explored various aspects of chromosome cohesion. Brehon Laurent (a recent arrival to the UK from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine) led a session describing novel work on chromatin structure in regulating chromosome function. Jesper Svejstrup (Cancer Research UK, Clare Hall Laboratories) presented evidence of a novel system for ensuring accurate ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation in a session, sponsored by the Biochemical Society, which also explored other covalent protein modi�fication systems in response to cell stress. Moving out of the cell nucleus, Daniela Delneri (University of Manchester) led a session reporting attempts to understand proteome and metabolome function and evolution, and Carol Munro (University of Aberdeen) described work on the pathological yeast Candida albicans in a session which also explored yeast systems in drug design and bioethanol formation. BYG has a long tradition of encouraging junior lab members to present work orally. Of 26 offered talks, six were given by graduate students and nine by postdoctoral researchers. One postgrad and two postdoc poster abstracts were selected for oral presentations. Jose� n Fernuis (postdoc, University of Edinburgh) won a £100 Formedium prize for her talk on pericentric chromosome cohesion, and Alicja Sochaj (postgraduate, University of Edinburgh) won a £100 Formedium prize for her poster on spindle checkpoint signalling