Dear, can the following message be forwarded to colleagues from Eastern European countries? The Bioinformatics and Systems Biology division of the Department of Plant Systems Biology (VIB -- Ghent University) is organizing a scientific event from the 25th of November 2012 until the 5th of December 2012 about *Generation and Analysis of Next Generation Sequence (NGS) data*. This two-week workshop is sponsored by the *European Science Foundation (ESF)*, and will discuss recent advances and future perspectives in next generation sequence analysis, together with the necessary applications on the data of user submitted projects. In this workshop, two innovative and complementary schemes will address the issue of introducing advanced plant genomics to Eastern European countries. We believe these initiatives could have the potential to achieve a step-change in plant genomics in Eastern European countries. _The initiative will fund the generation of up to 5 Next Generation Sequencing datasets, specifically resutling from invited proposals from Eastern European countries._ This will be followed up by a dedicated sequence analysis workshop, which will be open to participants across Europe, but at which the Next Generation Sequencing data obtained will be analysed. Collaborative projects are welcome, but the projects must be led by a group from an Eastern European country. Applicants will need to ensure that their one page proposal identifies an individual with suitable bioinformatics experience to qualify them for the subsequent NGS workshop. The deadline for project submission is July 15. Please visit http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/ngs_workshop/ for more information. kind regards, The organizing commitee