DESCRIPTION: This proposal is a request for partial financial support for a meeting on Molecular Chaperones and the Heat Shock Response to be held from May 6 - May 10, 1998 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. This meeting is the premier international format for presentation of new results in this area, and is attended by virtually every principal investigator in the field. The explosion of new information on how the folded state of proteins is acquired and maintained in vivo and the involvement of this process in an increasing number of disease states guarantees the excitement of this meeting. Highlights of the meeting will be devoted to: 1. amyloid diseases emphasizing the role of alternative folding pathways and increasing evidence for chaperone involvement, with attention to prion protein, transthyretin and yeast model systems; 2. the explosion of structural and mechanistic information on some of the most intensively studied chaperones; 3. the integral role of chaperones in diverse cellular transactions and the signal transduction pathways that integrate them. The field of heat shock proteins and molecular chaperones has grown rapidly and draws interest not only from traditional scientific disciplines in the basic sciences but also from numerous areas of biomedical research including neurodegenerative disease, infectious diseases, cancer, and heart disease. The meeting will include 7 lecture and 3 poster sessions. Each session will consist of 8 - 9 oral presentations and will be chaired by an invited speaker. A maximum of two additional speakers will be preinvited per meeting to feature presentations by leading scientists, to be responsive to exciting new developments, to encourage diverse participation and to recognize new investigators. Women are well represented among organizers and invited participants.