Plant Biology Sessions
Improving photosynthesis
Dates: 29th & 30th June
Organized by: Steve Long (University of Illinois) and Richard Leegood (University of Sheffield)
Contact: slong@illinois.edu; r.leegood@sheffield.ac.uk
Confirmed Speakers
John Sheehy (IRRI), Julian Hibberd (Cambridge University), Dean Price (The Australian National University), Lisa Ainsworth (University of Illinois), Martin Parry (Rothamsted Research), Christoph Peterhänsel (Leibniz Universitaet Hannover), Paul Quick (IRRI), Andreas Weber (Heinrich-Heine-Universität), Michel Havaux (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA)), Howard Griffiths (Cambridge University), Cheryl Kerfeld (DOE Joint Genome Institute & UC Berkeley), Maureen Hanson (Cornell University), Christine Raines (University of Essex)
Description
Increasing the productivity of the major food crops is a major challenge in maintaining food security and increased biomass and in countering the current large rises in the costs of these basic commodities. Increasing photosynthetic efficiency is seen as a key factor in meeting this challenge and helping to reduce the yield gap. There are a number of aspects of photosynthesis that are open to improvement, including light harvesting and photoprotection, carbon assimilation and partitioning and, perhaps most importantly, tackling the problem of photorespiration. This session will interest those involved in environmental plant physiology, crop breeding and biotechnology, plant biochemistry, and photosynthesis.
Chloroplast biogenesis
Dates: 1st & 2nd July
Organized by: Enrique Lopez-Juez (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Paul Jarvis (University of Leicester)
Contact: E.Lopez@rhul.ac.uk; rpj3@leicester.ac.uk
Confirmed Speakers
Ralph Bock (MPI Golm); Jane Langdale (University of Oxford), Kazuo Shinozaki (RIKEN Tsukuba Institute), Kathy Osteryoung (Michigan State University), Felix Kessler (University of Neuchatel), Ian Small (University of Western Australia), Klaas Van Wijk (Cornell University), Takehito Inaba (University of Miyazaki), John Allen (Queen Mary, University of London), Wataru Sakamoto (Okayama University), Sacha Baginsky (Martin Luther University Halle), Matthew Terry (University of Southampton), Hirokazu Kobayashi (University of Shizuoka)
Description
Chloroplasts have been described as the organelles that sustain us. An expected doubling in the demand for food by 2050 calls for an increase in the primary production that takes place in chloroplasts. Non-photosynthetic plastids also act as major factories for natural products. All this calls for a thorough understanding of the biogenesis and cellular biology of chloroplasts and other plastid forms. Genetic, biochemical and many genomic studies are unravelling, for example, the function of the chloroplast genetic machinery, the import of nucleus-encoded proteins, and the organelle division machinery. However some questions remain poorly answered or entirely unexplored: Chloroplast function and gene expression being controlled by developmental and environmental cues, what is the molecular nature of the sensors of those cues? What are the signals used to report plastid function to the nucleus? What determines the type of chloroplast a cell contains? What initiates and terminates plastid proliferation, at different points in different cell types? How is chloroplast differentiation integrated into a cell's proliferation and differentiation programme? This session will bring together experts in various disciplines at the interface of which these questions lie.
Evolution of physiological traits
Dates: 1st & 2nd July
Organized by: Colin Osborne (University of Sheffield)
Contact: c.p.osborne@sheffield.ac.uk
Confirmed Speakers
Bill Martin (Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf, Germany), David Beerling (University of Sheffield, UK), Lisa Donovan (University of Georgia, USA), Howard Griffiths (Univeristy of Cambridge), Pascal-Antoine Christin (Brown University), Paul Falkowski (Rutgers University), Taylor Field (University of Tennessee), John Raven (University of Dundee), Erika Edwards (Brown University), Lawren Sack (UCLA), Jonathan Leake (University of Sheffield), Karl Niklas (Cornell University)
Description
Recent advances in phylogenetics, genomics, physiology and paleobiology have brought major advances in our understanding of how physiological traits have evolved in autotrophic organisms. This session will bring together leading figures in each of these fields, aiming to provide a stimulating, multi-disciplinary view of physiological trait evolution, and tackling a number of key questions. What have been the important evolutionary innovations in the history of autotrophs? What do we know about the origins of these physiological traits? What are the key drivers of trait diversification? Does selection favour distinct combinations of physiological traits? What are the biophysical constraints on the adaptive landscape? How have the same physiological syndromes evolved independently in multiple lineages? How have past evolutionary events changed the Earth System, and how will ongoing global change drive physiological adaptations in wild and agricultural species?
The session is jointly sponsored by the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) and the British Ecological Society (BES), through the Plant Environmental Physiology Group.
Plant hormone signal transduction and the control of agronomic traits
Dates: 29th June, 30th June (am only)
Organized by: Claus Schwechheimer (Technische Universität München)
Contact: claus.schwechheimer@wzw.tum.de
Confirmed Speakers
Peter Hedden (Rothamsted Research), Shinjiro Yamaguchi (RIKEN, Yokohama), Salomé Prat (CSIC Madrid), Paul Nicholson (John Innes Centre), Patrick Achard (IBMP, Strasbourg), Marcel Quint (IPB, Halle), Luz Irina Calderon-Villalobos (IPB, Halle), Lars Ostergaard (John Innes Centre), Joost van Dongen (MPI Golm)
Description
Phytohormones are major regulators of plant growth and development. Basic research conducted over the past 15 years has elucidated the basic molecular mechanisms that underly the responses to all major plant hormones. Hormone research bears the advantage that physiological analyses on hormone responses can be easily transferred between species and is therefore amenable to comparative physiological studies. In this session, scientists working on model and crop plant species will present their recent findings on the role of specific hormone signal transduction pathways in controlling agronomically important traits, and they will discuss the transferability of their findings to other plant species and possibly to other growth controlling traits.
Induced resistance against biotic attack
Dates: 29th & 30th June
Organized by: Mike Roberts (Lancaster University) and Jurriaan Ton (University of Sheffield)
Contact: m.r.roberts@lancaster.ac.uk; j.ton@sheffield.ac.uk
Confirmed Speakers
Katherine Denby (Warwick University), Corné Pieterse (Utrecht University), Sergio Rasmann (University of Lausanne), Dale Walters (Scottish Agricultural College), Matthias Erb (Max Planck, Jena), Klaus Schläppi (Max Planck, Köln), Victor Flors (University of Jaume I), Harrold van den Burg (University of Amsterdam), Brigitte Mauch-Mani (University of Neuchatel), Monica Höfte (Ghent University), Vivianne Vleeshouwers (Wageningen University), Luis Mar (Aberystwyth University)
Description
Crop losses to pests and disease continue to pose a significant threat to agriculture and food security. Under conditions where chemical control of pathogenic microorganisms and invertebrate pests is becoming unsustainable, improved understanding of natural plant defences against biotic attack is essential. The aim of this session is to bring together scientists working across a range of disciplines, from the level of molecular signalling to multi-trophic ecological interactions, to highlight the latest progress in mechanisms and consequences of induced plant resistance against pests and pathogens. The session will begin with topics covering the basic biology and ecology of resistance responses during plant-pathogen and plant-insect interactions. The session will then move on to the phenomenon of long-term priming of induced resistance and the emerging role of epigenetic regulatory mechanisms therein, before considering how induced resistance can be integrated in sustainable agriculture.
The environmental control of development
Dates: 30th June (pm only) & 1st July
Organized by: Karen Halliday (University of Edinburgh) and Miriam Gifford (Warwick University)
Contact: miriam.gifford@warwick.ac.uk; karen.halliday@ed.ac.uk
Confirmed Speakers
Mikhail Semenov (Rothamsted Research), Cris Kuhlemeier (University of Bern), Marc Knight (Durham University), Steve Penfield (University of Exeter), Lionel Dupuy (The James Hutton Institute), Christian Fleck (University of Freiburg), Ida Ruberti (Istituto Biologia e Patologia Molecolari CNR), Paul Devlin (Royal Holloway, University of London),
Description
The interaction between an organism and its environment is complex, particularly for plants that are sessile and must cope with environmental extremes. Plant growth and development is highly plastic so that plants can be responsive to conditions and therefore grow, flower and set seed at optimum times for maximum production. If we are to develop ways to ensure food security in a changing climate we must understand the mechanisms by which plants integrate and respond to multiple environmental factors. This will enable us to harness the plasticity to develop crops that can withstand unfavourable conditions whilst still retaining yield.
This session focuses on modelling the interaction between the environment and plant development. The approaches taken are diverse, from agronomic models exploring the how plants interact with their physical environment, through to gene network reconstruction to understand the fine-tuning of environmental signal integration. All work in this session aims to understand multiple layers of the plant’s response to a dynamic environment.