OPTIONAL ACTIVITIES: 

Optional events for Symposium attendees:

• Thursday evening, April 10 - Workshop with Chris Elsik (BeeBase):  Community contributions to genome annotation featuring use of the Apollo Genome Annotation Curation Tool.  Cost to attend is $25. 

• Friday evening, April 11 - Workshop with Scott Cain and Dave Clements on Chado, a database schema for representing biological data.  Chado is a part of GMOD and is used at BeetleBase, FlyBase, wFleaBase, and many other online databases.  There is no cost to attend this workshop but registration is requested. 

• Saturday evening, April 12 - Enjoy an evening of barbeque and Kansas City Jazz with Bram Wijnands and friends, hosted by the Kansas City Jazz Ambassadors, in the historic 18th and Vine district.  Re-live the birth and evolution of jazz while visiting the Mutual Musicians Foundation site.  This general area is also home to the American Jazz Museum.  Additional information that may be of interest.  The separate charge for this optional activity is $50 ($40 for students).  Seating is limited to the first 150 registrants.

• Sunday morning, April 13 - Participate in a roundtable discussion led by members of the ArthropodBase Consortium regarding the generation of integrated arthropod genome databases, tools for genome analysis, and community annotation. 

• Throughout the meeting, arthropod genome database and bioinformatics tool developers will be available for individual training on Apollo and database use as well as BeeSpace, the automated literature annotation system developed by Bruce Schatz and colleagues.

 Symposium funding provided by the Center for Genomic Studies on Arthropods Affecting Human, Animal and Plant Health with support from Targeted Excellence at Kansas State University.