This year the RNA Society held its annual meeting in Japan - a little far for the average graduate student to travel. Not that I even knew about this meeting before it happened, but even so. It's quite a long distance for many of us to travel to hear about the latest research in RNA, so unfortunately we had to miss it this year.
The good news is that a number of RNA researchers felt the same way, and decided to organize an alternative, RNA Society-sponsored, more local conference, appropriately titled the Corn Belt RNA Conference. Held at the University of Missouri Columbia (or Mizzou, as the kids call it), the 2-day conference provided the opportunity to researchers from around the Midwest to travel to a central location and discuss the research ongoing in their labs. Topics ranging from RNA aptamers to single-molecule spectroscopy to control of RNA-protein interactions were presented by grad students from local universities. The conference also featured a poster session that gave more students the opportunity to discuss research in an informal setting, and a number of different socializing opportunities during coffee breaks and dinner on Friday night. The conference also featured keynote speaker John Abelson, whose work includes, among other things, being one of the first researchers to elucidate the mechanism of alternative splicing. Oh, and he discovered and named the spliceosome. You know, no big deal.
My overall impression of the conference, held for the first time this year, was extremely positive! The conference was held at the Bond Life Sciences Center, an extremely nice building that holds many of the biological science labs at Mizzou. Not only that, but it has a cafe called the Catalyst Cafe (with sandwiches like the Double Helix Hoagie - check out the sign... anyone know what that is?) and a number of great artistic flairs, such as a sidewalk shaped like a DNA double helix.
The auditorium had a nice set-up, allowing for presenters to clearly show their work. The poster session and set-up for coffee, snacks, and dinner were not too crowded (although they could have spread out a little bit more - they could have taken out a few tables and given the posters a little more space). As it was the first conference, it was much smaller than your bigger, more established conferences, with probably between 50 and 100 people total (on the lower end for sure). And, because it was smaller, and the organizers received money from the University and the RNA Society, there was no registration fee! The only payment we needed to make was for the hotel, and with the discount for attending the conference and splitting the room between multiple people, the cost ended up being fairly small (about $30 per person). Only the cost of gas and occasional food not provided by the hotel or the conference (during travel, at the local bars after the poster session) added to our expenses.
Probably the best thing about this conference, something that I haven't experienced in other conferences and events I've attended, was that everything was so relevant. Unlike other conferences, which are much more general and cover a wide range of topics, all of the topics revolved around RNA and the techniques associated with studying RNA, which we could understand even if we hadn't used them before. Every talk had questions afterward from a number of different people, who likely hadn't heard of the research before the talks, showing how easily we could talk about different aspects of RNA. In my case, I had a good conversation with someone working on research that was very relevant to my own work, and he even suggested that I email his boss for advice. I wouldn't have gotten that suggestion, nor the good advice about my project, had I not attended!
If you are in RNA work and have the opportunity in the future (assuming they continue to hold the conference), you should attend next year!
Oh, and on the way to and from the conference from Illinois you can stop at crazy places and pick up cheesy gifts, as we did during our stop at Ozarkland.
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