Cross Disciplinary Sessions
The following cross disciplinary sessions are taking place at SEB Brighton 2016. Read more about them below.
Animal, Plant and Cell Cross Disciplinary Session
- Session 1: Environmental change and human disturbance
- Session 2: Biological invaders, disease and biotic interactions
- Session 3: From problems to solutions - using physiology to inform conservation and resource management
Plant and Cell Cross Disciplinary Sessions
- Re-wiring gene networks
- Synthetic systems
- Tools for synthetic biology
- Synthetic metabolism
Session 1 - Environmental change and human disturbance
Session 2 - Biological invaders, disease and biotic interactions
Session 3 - From problems to solutions - using physiology to inform conservation and resource management
Organisers:
Dr Craig Franklin (University of Queensland, Australia), Dr Steven Cooke (Carleton University, Canada), Dr Jodie Rummer (James Cook University, Australia) & Dr Connie O’Connor (Wildlife Conservation Society Canada)
Speakers:
Dr Rebecca Cramp (University of Queensland, Australia), Dr David Costantini (University of Antwerp, Belgium), Prof Nann Fangue (University of California Davis, USA), Dr Andrea Fuller (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa), Dr Mia Hoogenboom (James Cook University, Australia), Dr Kevin Hultine (Desert Botanical Garden, USA), Dr Kristi Miller (Fisheries & Oceans Canada), Dr Annegret Nicolai (Western University, Canada) & Dr Michael Siefkes (Sea Lamprey Control Program Manager, Great Lakes Fishery Commission)
Conservation physiology is an emerging discipline and helps to codify the "applied" mechanistic research linking animals to their environment being conducted by the scientific community. To some extent, conservation physiology has been focused on "problems". With this session we propose to move beyond problems to identifying solutions (especially on the final day). The first day will focus on how environmental conditions and human disturbance influence organisms and populations. The second day will focus on the physiology of biological invasions, disease and biotic interactions induced by environmental change and human activity. The final day will focus on integrated case studies of where conservation physiology has helped to solve conservation problems. This session will increase the value of the discipline to conservation practitioners and demonstrate how experimental biology can support the recovery of imperilled animal populations.
Organisers:
Dr Vardis Ntoukakis (University of Warwick), Dr Karen Pollizzi (Imperial College London, UK) & Dr Matias Zurbriggen (Heinrich Heine University, Germany)
Synthetic biology holds great promise for translation of scientific research as well as understanding of basic biological processes. This session will highlight a range of different synthetic biology approaches, in a wide variety of organisms (plants, animals and microbes), and molecular and computational tools with broad impact. The topics covered will include fundamental as well as translational research and be of interest to both computational and experimental researchers in synthetic biology. The session will include multiple aspects of synthetic biology including metabolic engineering, design and re-wiring of gene circuits, synthetic organisms, cellular interactions, and novel products.
Re-wiring gene networks:
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Synthetic cell-based sensors with programmed sensitivity, selectivity and dynamic ranges
Dr Baojun Wang (University of Edinburgh, UK)
- Rewiring transcription in E. coli
Dr Mark Isalan (Imperial College London, UK)
Synthetic Systems
- Engineering nitrogen symbiosis in cereals
Prof Giles Oldroyd (John Innes Centre, UK)
- Synthetic biology meets tissue engineering
Prof Jamie Davies (University of Edinburgh, UK)
- Improvement of resource use efficiency and productivity in crop plants
Dr Greta Nölke (Fraunhofer IME, Germany)
- Gene discovery and cell factory optimization using synthetic selections
Dr Hans Genee (NNF Center for Biosustainability, Denmark)
- Genomic engineering by transposable elements in vertebrates
Dr Zsuzsanna Izsvák (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Germany
Tools for synthetic biology:
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Optically controlled signalling in mammalian cells
Prof Wilfried Weber (University of Freiburg, Germany)
- Refinement of the standards for genetic design in Plant Synthetic Biology
Dr Diego Orzaez (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain)
- Plant synthetic biology: building new metabolic pathways and evolving new species
Prof Ralph Bock (Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology, Germany)
- Designable protein domain as the tools of synthetic biology
Prof Roman Jerala (National Institute of Chemistry Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Synthetic metabolism:
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We do it our (path) way: Bringing inorganic carbon into life with synthetic CO2-fixation
Dr Tobias Erb (Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, Germany)
- Direct light-driven synthesis of structurally complex high-value diterpenoids
Prof Birger Lindberg Møller (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
- Harnessing the terpenome
Dr Aymeric Leveau (John Innes Centre, UK)
- Engineering an expanded chemical palette in cells
Prof Hal Alper (University of Texas, USA)
The General Plant and Cell Biology session comprises talks and posters on all the aspects of plant and cell biology that are not catered to in the specific Section sessions. As such, the session is an important element of the scientific programme, with high-quality presentations on a wide spectrum of subjects. The General session takes place over one day at Brighton in 2016 and the programme of short talks will be selected from the abstracts and organised (as far as possible, but this is not a prerequisite) into the subject areas of the special interest groups of the Plant and Cell Sections. We particularly encourage presentations from PhD students and early career scientists.