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Dear Colleagues, As many of you know, we are working on developing a set of resources to allow the cloning of Tetrahymena genes by functional complementation of mutant phenotype; i.e. “cloning by complementation”. Results so far are promising that the method will prove successful. We hope that this resource will not only allow molecular analysis of existing classical genetic mutations, but spur further use of Tetrahymena as a model organism for forward genetics. However, many researchers trained in molecular, cellular, and reverse genetics methods are unfamiliar with the tools of Tetrahymena forward genetics. Therefore, we plan to present a “crash course” in these methods this summer, hosted by Ed Orias and Eileen Hamilton on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara. This course will take place July 14-19, 2008 (participants should plan on arrival on the 13th, departure on the 20th; there is still a possibility we may have to finish by the 18th, with departure on the 19th, depending on residence hall availability; we will know the end date for sure by early February.) We have significant support from our NIH grant to cover room and board at a UCSB facility, course materials, and a portion of travel expenses, depending on the total number of attendees. Currently, we anticipate limiting enrollment to about 15 attendees. The course will be fully hands-on and cover many genetic methods including rapid single-cell isolation, performing crosses, mapping mutants to a chromosome arm by nullisomic matings, and mating type determination. Participants will be encouraged to bring along an unmapped mutation from their own freezers to map. We will also cover methods for mass transformation that can be used with the new cloning by complementation library (under development) and for identifying the rescuing DNA fragment from that library. In order to squeeze all these methods into a six-day schedule, the course will be run in some ways like a televised cooking class (“We put ze cells in ze incubator, and Voila! Here are ze cultures as zey would appear two days later!”), although in the end, every student will get to perform every step of each experiment. Our plans for this course were discussed at the FASEB Ciliate Molecular Biology Conference in Tucson in July 2007. At that time, a possible forward and reverse genetics combo course was discussed, but since then, it has been decided to run only the forward genetics component in 2008. We also collected names of researchers interested in attending the course. At this time, we need a recount! The contract with UCSB to reserve the facilities must be signed within a short time, so if you are seriously interested in attending this course (even if you already signed the sheet in Tucson!), please let us know ASAP (by this Friday, January 18). Your response does not yet imply an iron-clad commitment to attend, but at least a quite serious interest. A definitive commitment will be needed by June 13. If you have questions, please email us. We look forward to seeing you this summer in beautiful Santa Barbara! Regards, Bob Coyne ([log in to unmask]) Ed Orias ([log in to unmask]) Eileen Hamilton ([log in to unmask])