The theme of this year's symposium is RNA, the universe's first biological macromolecule. RNA, a single-stranded nucleic acid, can act as a catalyst and as an information storage molecule. It is widely believed that early life forms had RNA-based genomes. In modern organisms, RNA plays a crucial role in many aspects of regulation, the process that determines when genes are translated into proteins. Without regulation, we would all be undifferentiated blobs. Biotechnologists have exploited RNA's structural properties to construct high-throughput gene expression assays, which are revolutionizing our understanding of cellular function and cancer.

Invited speakers discussed the application of computational methods from algorithm and complexity theory, sequence comparison, statistics, linguistics and statistical physics to problems of RNA structure, mRNA expression analysis, gene regulation and alternate splicing. Digitized videos of these lectures can now be viewed in QuickTime streaming video format. You will need to have within your browser the QuickTime plug-in, and select it as the player for all media files, to be able to view them movie. You can download the QuickTime Movie player for a PC or Mac free of charge at: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/index.html.

	1:00 - 1:15:	Introduction
		Dannie Durand, Biological Sciences and Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
	1:15 - 2:15:	Computing Synonymous RNA Spaces: The Cheshire catalyst's grin
		Barry Cohen, Computer Science Department, New Jersey Institute of Technology
		Abstract
	2:15 - 2:45:	Break
	2:45 - 3:45:	How does a biological cell turn its genes on and off?
		Harmen Bussemaker, Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University
		Abstract
	3:45 - 4:45:	What, how and how many: Genome-wide analysis of RNA splicing
		Javier Lopez, Department of Biological Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University
		Abstract
	4:45 - 5:45:	Reception