Meeting report of the 26th International Mammalian Genome Conference

A diverse group of geneticists, clinicians, and bioinformaticians converged on sunny St. Pete Beach, Florida, October 21–24, 2012, for the 26th International Mammalian Genome Conference (IMGC). Organized by Michelle Southard-Smith (Vanderbilt University) and Teresa Gunn (McLaughlin Research Institute) with help from the IMGS Secretariat, the conference attracted 148 participants from 14 countries. Investigators, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students returned to the site of the popular 11th IMGC (1997) to share exciting advances in mammalian genetics and genomics research, findings that underscored the continued and future importance of mammalian genetic models to human genetics and disease research. Multiple presenters highlighted how powerful large-scale mapping and phenotyping resources, disease models, and strain resequencing projects are fundamentally altering our understanding of gene regulation and the genetic factors underlying complex disease. The plenary presentations especially provided insight on how these new technologies enable us to expand the scope of our research questions and the mammalian systems we use to answer them. At the same time, the Verne Chapman Lecture provided valuable historical perspective on the role of mammalian models over the last half-century, and predicted the future opportunities and challenges facing geneticists in the next 50 years. Abstracts from the meeting are available at www.imgs.org, and online databases and resources presented at the meeting are listed in Table 1.