Late poster only abstract submission is now open for Beyond the Genome.

All participants are invited to submit abstracts for oral and poster presentations.

Once delegates have registered for the conference, they should send their abstract as an email attachment to conference-abstracts@biomedcentral.com, before the 19th September 2012. Please title your email Beyond the Genome to ensure your abstract is considered for a poster presentation.

Delegates must note that abstracts are to adhere strictly to the guidelines below.

Abstracts can be selected for either oral or poster presentation, and although delegates may state a preference via email, no guarantees can be given.  All accepted abstracts will be published in the abstract book of the conference and, unless the author states otherwise, will be published in an online supplement to BMC Proceedings.

The abstract text including references should not exceed 500 words. Confirmation of receipt of your abstract submission will be sent by email to the corresponding author.

The corresponding author of an oral or poster presentation has to register and pay for the conference before being permitted to submit an abstract. The time allowed for selected oral presentations will be 10 minutes.

Posters should be portrait orientation: size A0 841mm (width) × 1189mm (height)

Title

The title should be in bold, sentence case with no full stop at the end, e.g:
Results from experiments in this field

Authors
First name, middle initials if required, and surname with no full stop at the end. Underline the name of the corresponding author. A comma should separate author names. Where authors are from a number of different institutions, the appropriate institution number from the affiliation list should be given as a superscript number immediately after each author's name, e.g.:

John Smith¹, Susan Jones², Bill Fisher³

If the authors are presenting an abstract on behalf of a study group, this information should not be included in the author list, but should appear in an Acknowledgements section.

Affiliations
Affiliations should include department, institute, town and country. Where there are multiple affiliations, each should be listed as a separate paragraph. Each institute should appear in the order used against the author names (see above paragraph) and show the appropriate superscript number, e.g.:

¹Department, University, Town, State, Country, Zipcode, USA

²University, Town, State, Postcode, UK

²Company, Town, State, Canada, Postcode

Main text

• Should not be more than 500 words
• Please use single line spacing
• Type the text unjustified, without hyphenating words at line breaks
• Use hard returns only to end headings and paragraphs, not to rearrange lines
• Use the BioMed Central reference format (see below)
• Greek and other special characters may be included. If you are unable to reproduce a particular special character, please type out the name of the symbol in full
• SI units should be used throughout (litre and molar are permitted, however)
• Abbreviations should be used as sparingly as possible and should be defined when first used
• Web links (URLs) should be provided in full, including both the title of the site and the URL, in the following format: Reactome [http://www.reactome.org]
   

Structured abstracts
Abstracts that describe a method, software or a database can be submitted in an unstructured format. Research-based abstracts should be structured into sections using the following headings typed in bold with no colon at the end, e.g.:

Background
Followed by regular text, on a new line and in the same format as shown above for main text.
Materials and methods
Results
Conclusions

Tables
Tables should be numbered (e.g. Table 1) with an optional title and legend, and should be included in the document where they are to appear. Tables must be cited in the text.

Tables should be formatted using the "Table function" in a word processing program and pasted into the abstract box. Tables should not be created with tabs or submitted as graphical items.

Figures
Figures and illustrations should not be included.

Acknowledgements
Brief acknowledgements may be included and should be placed after Conclusions and before the References. If the abstract is being presented on behalf of a study group, this information should be noted here rather than in the author list.

References
All references should be cited consecutively in the text, using numbers in square brackets. Only papers that have been published, or are in press, or are available through public e-print or preprint servers should be included in the reference list.

Journal abbreviations should follow MEDLINE standards.

References should be at the end of the abstract in BioMed Central style and preceded by the relevant reference number. An example of a reference for a journal article follows. The full reference style guide can be found at the journal’s website (http://genomebiology.com/authors/instructions).

1. Chomczynski P, Sacchi N: Single-step method of RNA isolation by acid guanidinium thiocyanate-phenol-chloroform extraction. Anal Biochem 1987, 162:156-159.