The 2007 GRC on "Cilia, Mucus and Mucociliary Interactions" to be held in the Ventura Beach, CA Marriott Conference Center on February 4-9, 2007, will be a multi-disciplinary meeting involving basic and clinical research scientists from academia, government agencies and pharmaceutical industry. The 2007 conference is the latest in a series that historically has an outstanding record for bringing together world authorities on basic cell biology of cilia and mucus under normal and pathologic conditions.

The conference is modeled after four previous but independently-organized meetings. The first took place in Israel in 1997, the second in Italy in 1999, the third in Miami FL in 2002, and the last a "trial" GRC in Buellton, CA in February of 2005. All of these conferences were highly successful and identified the need for such a meeting every two to three years. Each of these meetings was the size of a typical GRC, suggesting that the requisite number of investigators continue to have high interest in such a meeting on a recurrent basis. Since there is no other routinely-organized conference on these topics which brings this wide variety of researchers into one room, the upcoming Gordon conference is not only timely, but also unique in its idea and structure. In the 2007 conference, there will be 9 sessions, starting on Sunday evening and ending on Thursday evening.

Each session will feature at least 4 invited talks and will be co-chaired by 2 discussion leaders. The goal of these talks is to present new findings and data not yet published, as is the tradition of GRC's. Each of the speakers will be individuals with a recognized scientific record in the areas of cilia, mucus, or mucociliary interactions or young investigators presenting outstanding data, usually representing work from the laboratory of a recognized leader in the field. Discussion leaders will be selected from individuals capable of stimulating and maintaining discussion who are knowledgeable in their areas and able to maintain focus and steer comments to areas related directly to the topic area. In addition, it is anticipated that late invited short talks (5-10 minutes plus discussion time) will complement each session and chosen as late as possible in order to represent true cutting edge and state-of-the-art work. These will be selected from the pool of participants/discussants and from any of the poster/abstract submissions. In addition to the platform presentations, each session will be complemented by poster presentations. The applicants will have the opportunity to indicate if they prefer a poster or platform venue, and those not chosen for platform presentation will be delegated to the poster session(s). The last GRC had a total of about 60 posters, and it is anticipated that we will have a greater number (approximately 80) in the 2007 meeting. If needed, room for laptops will be available for individuals who might wish to present additional data that cannot be easily shown on posters, such as 3-D molecular modeling, 3-D reconstruction of confocal images, video-microscopy and time-lapse microscopy movies, all of which are particularly well-suited for cilia and mucociliary studies. The primary viewing time for the posters will be during the late afternoons.