CSHL 2025 Conference on Eukaryotic mRNA Processing

The proposed conference on “Eukaryotic mRNA Processing” will convene scientists studying various aspects of mRNA processing, transport, turnover and their roles in human diseases. Major advances have recently been made in all these areas, and the proposed conference will be a timely event for discussing the latest unpublished results and exchanging ideas, thereby fostering new developments in this rapidly moving field. The proposed conference will be the fifteenth meeting in the series that is held every other year at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The most recent meeting was held in August 2023 and attracted 435 scientists internationally, who are actively investigating various aspects of messenger RNA maturation in eukaryotic cells using genetic, biochemical, molecular, cell biological, and computational approaches. The 2025 meeting will be held in person with a virtual audience for broadening access and for those that cannot attend in person. As in the previous meetings, a major focus of the 2025 meeting will be on nuclear events in mRNA maturation, including mRNA splicing and polyadenylation, the connections between transcription and mRNA maturation steps, the roles of mRNA processing events in the biology of viruses, the application of informatics and genome-wide approaches to the analysis of RNA processing, as well as the relevance of mRNA processing to the etiology of cancer and other diseases. We also expect relevant and timely contributions on topics related to the new coronavirus variant SARS-CoV-2, in particular on the experimental vaccines based on messenger RNA. The meeting will include two keynote lectures, eight plenary oral sessions and two poster sessions. Oral sessions will include ten or five 12-minute talks, respectively, with additional time for discussion. In response to major developments in the fields of RNA modification and the roles of RNA structure in processing, we have expanded the sessions devoted to these topics; this adaptability to the major movements in the field helps keep this meeting at the cutting edge and ensures that we will draw participants from traditional as well as emerging areas of RNA research. This subdivision, successfully piloted at the 2019 meeting, allows a broader representation of scientific fields. As always, except for the two keynote lectures, all speakers will be selected on the basis of the submitted abstracts, which encourages active participation by junior scientists. We will particularly encourage presentation of unpublished work by the students and postdoctoral fellows who are leading these projects, as has traditionally been a hallmark and a unique strength of the Cold Spring Harbor meetings.