Welcome to Vienna Biocenter PhD Symposium - 2011
We are very pleased to welcome you to the VBC PhD Symposium-2011 entitled “Think Alternative: Insights from Unconventional Model Organisms”. Each year, PhD students at the Vienna Biocenter try to come up with original ideas for a topic not closely related to the research currently done on our campus. This year we decided to examine the benefits of unconventional model organisms.
We encourage your attendance at this year’s VBC symposium for several reasons. First, an important step in trying to address a scientific question is to determine which organism would be best suited to tackle it. In many cases, we believe that the standard model organisms may not be the ideal choice. A broader understanding of the existing diversity is therefore beneficial to overcome limitations of standard model organisms. Second, several important discoveries have been made in unconventional models; the natural world is full of surprises, and we feel that this will be a great opportunity to emphasize some of these unexpected findings. Last, with the burst of sequencing capabilities, the lack of genome sequences will soon cease to be a limiting factor in the development of emerging model organisms. Thus, new model model organisms can overcome the limitations of current model organisms, they can, and have, resulted in important discoveries, and they are becoming simpler to use by the day.
We are proud to host world leading scientists who work on these emerging model organisms. The organizing committee would like to cordially invite all interested students and researchers to register and participate in this symposium.
