Q: My company has a product to release that would be of interest to your members. Could we have your membership mailing list please?

A: Sorry. ISAG does not give out its membership details. Nor does it allow its web site to be used to advertise products or services. We suggest you use the AnGenMap Discussion board for distributing your information - visit http://www.genome.iastate.edu/community/discuss.html. AnGenMap is distributed to 952 members, many of whom are ISAG members.

Q: Our city/convention centre would like to offer its site for the next ISAG conference. When are ISAG's conferences scheduled? And what do we need to do to have you meet in our venue?

A: ISAG had already decided that its next conferences will be:

• 2010: Edinburgh, United Kingdom
• 2012: Caim, Australia

A proposal to host an ISAG conference has to be made by ISAG members and is usually made at a General Business Meeting of the Society (held at conferences every 2 years).

Therefore if you wish to promote your venue you should identify an ISAG member who will champion your cause.

And sorry, see the FAQS (above), ISAG does not give out its membership list.

Q: How do I join ISAG?

A: Simply complete the membership application form. You will find this on the ISAG web site http://www.isag.us. On the Home page, click on the "Membership" page, then open the "ISAG membership application form" and follow the directions.

If your application is successful you will receive a letter of acceptance, and then an invoice for the membership fee will be sent to you for payment.

Q: What are the different categories of membership?

A: ISAG has 3 membership categories (for current membership prices, click here):

• Institutional members (i.e., labs who wish to participate in the ISAG International Comparison tests)
• Individual members (who have voting rights and can be elected office holders in the Society)
• Honorary members (awarded by the Society for outstanding service to the Society plus an outstanding contribution to science. There are currently only 8 Honorary members.)

Benefits of membership details are provided with the "ISAG membership application form". In brief they are:

• Institutional members receive the Journal at a substantially reduced rate, and participate in
• International Comparison tests (to standardize the reporting of parentage genotypes).
• Individual members can become elected officers of the Society, can be elected to serve on Standing Committees and receive online access to Animal Genetics.
• Both individual and institutional members pay substantially lower Conference Registration fees than non-members.

However what is not stated there is that ISAG is a small to medium sized Society, currently with about 150 institutional members and nearly 700 individual members from over 55 countries. So it is genuinely international in composition and, like a large family it is friendly and supportive. It exists to promote the science of animal genetics, and covers a very wide range of species. Is focus is mainly on domesticated farmed or companion species rather than wild species and tends to be production rather than ecology based.

Species matters are handled by specialist Standing Committees which are elected as they are needed by the Society.

Every 2 years we meet at an International Conference on Animal Genetics in a different location selected by the whole membership on the basis of scientific, cultural and regional attributes.

Q: I wish to cite an abstract of a poster presented at the ISAG 2000 Minneapolis conference. Please send me information regarding Anim Genet 31 suppl 1 (ISAG abstracts, Minneapolis 2000) if such a publication exists.

A: Please note that ISAG conference proceedings are NO LONGER published as a supplement of Animal Genetics. The last conference proceedings to be published as supplement were those of the 1998 ISAG conference in Auckland, New Zealand. From 2000, no other supplements of Animal Genetics for ISAG conference proceedings will be published.

However, the proceedings of all ISAG conferences from 2000 (comprising the abstracts of plenary presentations and presented posters) will be available online on the ISAG web site, http://www.isag.us.

To view these abstracts visit the ISAG web site home page and click on the page entitled 'Conferences'. When it appears, scroll down until you come to the proceedings of the conference that you wish to view. There you will see the abstracts arranged in the subject sections to which they were submitted and an author index.

Please note that (as was the custom with the published Supplements):

• Abstracts that were not presented in poster form at the Conference have been excluded from the proceedings.
• These abstracts have not been subject to the full peer review process as practiced by Animal Genetics.

For citation purposes, it is recommended that you cite the (online) URL (in addition to the other details).