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The 25th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research, Vancouver, Canada 28th July – 2nd August 2014
I was fortunate enough to receive a generous grant from the BSPP to attend the International Congress of Arabidopsis Research (ICAR) last summer. The congress welcomed over 600 participants to the beautiful Chan Centre at the University of British Columbia (UBC) for five days of exciting science. ICAR is a broad meeting, covering many biological disciplines within the Arabidopsis community. I learned about new findings in fields not directly related to my own, as well as methods and technologies that have already informed and influenced my work.
Jeff Dangl (University of North Carolina) gave an excellent keynote lecture outlining research on plant-microbe interactions that has been the focus of his lab for the past 25 years. Peter McCourt (University of Toronto) delivered another great keynote on hormone signalling where he urged scientists to ‘not give up on this little guy’ – referring of course to the tiny Arabidopsis weed that was the focus of the meeting. I particularly enjoyed the plenary lecture by Sean Cutler (University of California) about agrichemical control of drought tolerance using engineered ABA receptors. Here he described engineering the flexible binding pocket of an ABA receptor to bind already available agrichemicals and improve plant yield. Plenaries by Joe Ecker (The Salk Institute) and Mark Estelle (University of California) stressed the importance of transcriptional waves in hormonal signalling pathways, and Keiko Torii (University of Washington) gave a great talk about stomatal patterning.
At the concurrent session on Modelling, Bioinformatics, and Systems Biology I heard talks by Siobhan Brady (University of California), Ross Sozzani (North Carolina State University) and Sally Assmann (Penn State University) on different ways to use ‘omics and high-throughput approaches to understand the complexity of plant growth and development. In the concurrent session on Biotic Stress/ Plant Defence I learned about the most recent findings from Thorsten Nurnberger’s (Univeristat Tubingen) group on a new class of microbial elicitors and their plant receptors. Yuelin Zhang (University of British Columbia) described a group of kinases that associate with the flagellin receptor FLS2 and are hyper-phosphorylated after microbial perception. In the section on Signal Transduction and Integration, Sorina Popescu (Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research) discussed using protein microarrays and network analysis to understand the plant immune response. During the poster sessions, many colleagues provided helpful feedback and ideas for future work, and I met with collaborators to discuss some of these future projects.
I also attended a few ‘special interest’ workshops. The first was on the new Arabidopsis Information Portal that was quite useful. Another was on Small Molecules in Defence and Development, where I heard from Clarice Souza (University of California) about oligogalacturonide-induced immune signalling. Kate Warpeha (University of Illinois) discussed the role of phenylpropanoids in stress signalling. And finally, I also attended a workshop for Early Career Researchers focused on funding opportunities and academic job hunting, which I found very valuable.
The congress dinner was held at the stunning Museum of Anthropology, where we were offered a guided tour of artefacts from all over the world. I found the Haida pieces the most interesting; in particular, Bill Reid’s The Raven and The First Men.
In all, attending ICAR was a great experience. Thank-you so much for the travel grant!
Jacqueline Monaghan The Sainsbury Laboratory
