The abstracts of the 2005–2009 American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) Annual Meetings are attached to this article as a searchable PDF file. To view the file, click on the “Abstracts” link in the content box of the HTML version of this article. The ASCB and the Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBoC) have decided to present the Annual Meeting abstracts retroactively in this manner to ensure the abstracts will be clearly associated with the ASCB's basic research journal and can be properly archived. The abstracts of the 2010 ASCB Annual Meeting were published previously (American Society for Cell Biology, 2010). Historically, abstracts of each ASCB Annual Meeting were published as a printed supplement to MBoC. That practice was discontinued in 2005, and abstracts were instead made available on the ASCB's website (www.ascb.org). Thus, the historical link between the abstracts and the journal became tenuous, although authors were encouraged to cite ASCB Annual Meeting abstracts as having appeared in a supplement to MBoC. The association between the Annual Meeting abstracts and MBoC will be restored by making the abstracts available in the online journal. Archiving of meeting abstracts is important, because the abstracts are part of the scientific literature and need to be permanently available. Although the ASCB is committed to maintaining abstracts from its Annual Meetings since 2003 on its website, it is prudent to preserve such documents in multiple locations. The 2005–2010 Annual Meeting abstracts will now be available on the MBoC website at HighWire Press and in downstream repositories, such as PubMed Central, as well as on the ASCB website. In the future, MBoC will publish abstracts from each ASCB Annual Meeting shortly after the meeting is held. All abstracts submitted for ASCB Annual Meetings are screened by the abstract programming committee to ensure that they meet minimum submission standards. However, they are not peer-reviewed. Supplementary Material Abstracts
