• “mRNAseq for ‘Semimodel’ Organisms” — Two-day, hands-on workshop will introduce biologists to doing reference-based transcriptome analysis with TopHat, Cufflinks and DAVID.

The primary focus will be on “semimodel” organisms — organisms with good quality reference genomes but relatively incomplete gene annotations. This includes most animals and plants that are not major model organisms. The workshop will be eukaryote-focused (large genomes, and genes with introns).

Titus Brown is the lead instructor for the workshop, scheduled from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, March 4-5, in Valley Hall.

The workshop is open to everyone, including graduate students, postdocs, staff, faculty and community members. Space reserved for School of Veterinary Medicine affiliates, who should use this registration link. Others should use the registration link on this information page.

• Biorepositories Initiative Conference — "Implementing a Biospecimen Management System at UC Davis: Developing an Integrated Research Infrastructure,” introducing the UC Davis Biorepositories Initiative.

Open to all faculty and staff from both the Sacramento and Davis campuses who would like to express their ideas, needs and priorities involving human biospecimens. In particular, the conference is directed toward faculty and staff who:

• Need to obtain biospecimens for their research
• Currently collect biospecimens for research
• Are stakeholders in an established biorepository
• Want to know more about the use of human biospecimens
• Have questions, suggestions or comments about biospecimen management at UC Davis

The initiative is meant to define a strategy for developing, implementing and sustaining a research infrastructure to facilitate resourceful biospecimen management in support of high-quality biomedical research, enhance internal and external collaborations, and seamlessly connect with other university initiatives.

The conference speakers: Nicholas Anderson, director, Informatics Research, and the Robert D. Cardiff Professor of Informatics; and Stephanie Soares, program manager, Biorepositories Initiative.

The conference is scheduled from 9 to 11 a.m. Wednesday, March 11, in the auditorium of the Comprehensive Cancer Center on the Sacramento campus. A continental breakfast will be provided. RSVPs are requested by Friday (Feb. 27) and may be arranged online or by sending an email to Stephanie Soares.

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