'The 4-D Nucleome 2014' will be held in Hiroshima, Japan

In 1944, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger published a book entitled "What Is Life?" in Ireland. Seventy years later, you might get a hint of the answer by exploring the world of "4D Nucleome" in Japan. The latest advances in understanding the principles behind the three-dimensional organization of the cell nucleus in space and time (the 4th dimension) will be presented at an international conference, "The 4D Nucleome 2014," in Hiroshima, Japan, from December 17 to 20, 2014. The conference will be hosted by the Research Center for the Mathematics on Chromatin Live Dynamics (RCMCD) of Hiroshima University. The conference details are available at http://www.mls.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/chrom/4dn/. On-site registration is permitted.

"4D Nucleome" is a groundbreaking research area that was adopted as a common-fund project by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2014. The first 4D Nucleome workshop was held in Mainz, Germany, by Profs. Thomas Cremer and Christoph Cremer in 2013, where the future research directions for nuclear events in cells were discussed in considering newly emerging experimental and theoretical methodologies. The 4D Nucleome 2014 will update the ideas shared in the last meeting. We will invite leading researchers from Europe and the US with distinguished Japanese researchers. They will describe the current states of the 4D Nucleome research and discuss the future directions. The featured topics in the 4D Nucleome 2014 include the followings: "Super resolution fluorescence and electron microscopy," "Quantitative 3D and 4D image analysis," "High-throughput molecular biological approaches," and "3D and 4D modeling of the functional nuclear architecture." "Our conference will be a great opportunity to share ideas on this rapidly growing field and facilitate the interdisciplinary collaborations that are essential for '4D Nucleome' research," said Prof. Satoshi Tashiro, one of the organizers of the conference.

A panegyric for the nucleus: reflections and projections

Thoru Pederson, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA, U.S.A.

4D Nucleome in NIH: Genome and transcriptome dynamics in cancer cells

Thomas Ried, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, U.S.A.

4D Nucleome in Europe: Changes of the nuclear landscape during preimplantation development of fertilized and cloned bovine embryos

Thomas Cremer, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany

Prof. Shin-ichi Tate, Director of RCMCD, said, "The research on the nuclear events in cells has become a central focus in science and attracts researchers in various disciplines. The 'nuclear science' in cells can be a topic in physics ('nuclear physics' in cells), which requires for devising new instrumentation to grasp nuclear phenomena quantitatively and profound theoretical analyses to comprehend the physical principles behind the observed data. In this sense, 4D Nucleome forms an interdisciplinary research field that has happened in structural biology."