Bridget Crampton of CSIR Biosciences recently attended an EMBO plant science conference in Ghent, Belgium entitled “From basic genomics to systems biology“.
The conference took place from 2 – 4 May 2007, and was dedicated to the memory of Jozef Schell, who was instrumental in the discovery of the Ti plasmid Agrobacterium tumefaciens, and that a segment of this plasmid, the T-DNA, is transferred to plant cells. This discovery formed the basis of plant transformation studies today.
The conference covered a broad range of topics including control of plant development; photosynthesis and chloroplast and mitochondrial function; plant-microbe and virus interactions; plant reproduction, genetic variation and comparative genomics; metabolism and metabolic signalling; and RNA processing, gene silencing and recombination.
The conference featured many talks by prominent plant scientists including Marc Van Montagu (The future of Plant Science), Dirk Inze (Endoreduplication: a matter of efficiency), Jeff Dangl (The Plant-Immune System), Barbara Hohn (Transgeneration memory of stress in plants), Dianna Bowles (The role of glycosylation in cellular homeostasis), Csaba Koncz (Signalling roles of plant AMP-activated protein kinases), Thomas Hohn (Plant viruses and siRNA) and David Baulcombe (Short silencing RNA networks).
Bridget Crampton presented a poster entitled “The salicyclic acid signalling pathway confers tolerance to a biotrophic rust pathogen in pearl millet” which was received well and attracted a number of questions.