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COST Action 853

Agricultural Biomarkers for Array-Technology

Draft Minutes

1st Management Committee Meeting

7th and 8th March 2002

8, Square de Meeus, Room 2 F, Brussels, BE

Participants

1. Welcome to participants

The Scientific Secretary, Joachim BOLLMANN, from the Commission COST Secretariat, opened the meeting and welcomed the participants.

He said apologies for absence were received from Mr. Knut RUDI from Sweden and Mr. Dietmar BLOHM, Germany.

2. Adoption of the agenda

The draft agenda was approved.

3. Presentation of the delegations

Delegates from 16 countries were present. Each participant introduced himself and explained his interest in the Action.

The Action had been proposed by Mr. Jürg FREY, Switzerland, who shortly presented the Technical Annex of the Memorandum of Understanding, the legal basis of the Action.

The Commission COST Secretariat said that each participant in this meeting should use their international contacts and make his or her colleagues in the field aware of the existence of this COST Action. Scientists from COST countries interested in the Action should contact, as soon as possible, their national COST co-ordinators. The names of the co-ordinators can be found on the COST internet site http://cost.cordis.lu/src/home.cfm.

4. General information on the COST mechanism

The Commission COST Secretariat informed on COST in general.

The following documents were made available to the delegates and discussed:

1. Rules and procedure for implementing COST Actions
2. Draft rules and procedure for the Management Committee of COST Action 853 (see Agenda Item 6)
3. Financing of COST activities from the COST budget
4. Short-term scientific missions (STSM) (see Agenda Item 8)
5. Commission rules for reimbursement of experts' expenses.

It was highlighted that

• COST is a scheme for co-ordinating nationally funded research (only a rather limited amount of money will be made available by the Commission to cover, in particular, travel expenses).
• Participation in an Action is voluntary and based on the active interest of countries involved.
• The work takes the form of a concerted action governed by a Management Committee (MC).

It was emphasised that the members of the MC are National Delegates representing their countries. They have a strong role in decision making in the Management Committee. Within their countries their role is to ensure that information about the Action flows to all interested parties and information from the country flows into the Action.

5. Status of COST Action 853

The Action started formally on 31st October 2001 and ends five years after the date of the first Management Committee Meeting, this is it ends on the 6th March 2007.

Until the day of the meeting out of the 33 COST countries and one associated country, 15 countries had signed the Action, and further 2 COST Countries had indicated their intention to sign.

A regularly up-dated overview of the status of the Action can be accessed on the internet under http://www.cordis.lu/cost/home.html.

[Note added after the meeting: Please find the updated list of the Management Committee Members attached.]

6. Agreement on the Rules of procedure for the Management Committee of COST Action 851 - Decision on the Secretariat

The draft rules of procedure were approved with the following specifications:

• Article 8 is to read 'Meetings of the MC shall be officially held only if at least half of the Signatories are present.'
• Article 13 first sentence is to read 'The working language is English.'

It was noted that the issue of intellectual property rights was likely to become important in the course of the Action.

[The approved rules and procedures for COST Action 853 are annexed].

On the invitation of the Management Committee the Commission COST Secretariat is providing the Secretariat of the Action.

7. Election of chairperson and vice-chairperson

The Management Committee unanimously elected Mr. Jürg FREY, Switzerland, Chairman of COST Action 853.

The Committee unanimously elected Mr. Günther ADAM, Germany, Vice-Chairman.

8. Working plan for the implementation of COST Action 853

The newly elected chairman of COST Action 853 took up the chair.

The working programme of COST Action 853 was discussed. On the basis of the Technical Annex of the Memorandum of Understanding the Committee decided to install five Working Groups, one more than proposed.

As chairpersons of the Working Groups were elected:

Working Group 1: Nucleic-Acid based Micro-Arrays

Chairman: (Mr.) Peter BONANTS, NL

Working Group 2: Protein-Based Micro-Arrays

Chairman: (Mr.) Ian BARKER, UK

It was understood that this Working Group would take-up work later in the course of the Action.

Working Group 3: Bioinformatics and Information Dissemination

Chairman: (Mr.) Mr. Peter VON ROHR, CH

Working Group 4: Chip Production and Analysis

(Mr.) Dietmar BLOHM, DE

Working Group 5: Micro-Array Technology for Environmental Monitoring

(Mr.) Xavier NESME

The objective of this new Working Group is to collect information to develop MT for environmental monitoring in agro-ecosystems as required for instance to evaluate the impact of phytosanitary or other pollutants inputs, of agricultural practices or of other relevant ecological factors. For this purpose, MT may be used to measure the effect on three environmental indicators:

• community diversity (meta-genome fingerprinting)
• key gene expression of functional communities (marker function)
• whole genome expression of selected strains (bio-marker expression).

Regarding Short Term scientific Missions, it was decided to set up an evaluation group, consisting of the chairman, the vice-chairman of the Action, and the chairs of the Working Groups. This group should decide on applications, and report back to the next Management Committee. Proposals should be sent in for a first batch until end of April 2002. The offer of the Vice-chairman to have his institute provide the administration for the Short Term Scientific Missions was accepted.

Next Meetings:

The Management Committee decided to have

• a meeting of Working Groups 1 and 3 (together with a Management Committee Meeting) from Thursday 26th Sept. to 28th Sept 2002 in Switzerland.

[The meeting will take in Waedenswil, and not, as initially thought, in Einsiedeln.]

9. Place and date of next meeting

The Committee decided to have its second Management Committee Meeting (together with the Working Group 1 and 3 meeting) in September in Switzerland.

10. Miscellaneous

The chairman said he would do his best to establish a specific web-page for COST 853.