Gene Networks in Animal Development and Evolution
Organizered by Eric Davidson and Michael Levine,  this meeting was held on February 15-16, 2008 at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, CA. 

Meeting Overview:
Gene regulatory networks represent the genomic program for the development of animal embryos, body parts, and cell types. They incorporate the interactions of intercellular signals with regulatory genes, and of regulatory genes with one another, via the transcription factors they encode. Gene regulatory networks indicate how the A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s of the DNA genome determine which regulatory genes will be expressed in time and space during development. This Colloquium will have four sessions. The first is devoted to gene regulatory networks that control early embryonic development. There will be a particular focus on how the embryo transforms maternally inherited spatial cues into transcriptional domains of specific developmental fate. The second session concerns later developmental processes: organogenesis, terminal fate diversification and stem cell specification. The third session is about regulatory processes in complex multigenic systems, such as chromatin domains, and large clusters of related genes. Evolution of the body plan must occur by changes in the gene networks controlling development, and the final session of the Colloquium concerns this approach to understanding the generation of diversity and novelty during animal evolution.