Funds are requested to support attendance at the 11th International Conference on Mechanisms of Plant Development, which will take place from August 15-19 2010 in Saxons River, Vermont. This semi-annual conference will bring together biologists studying plant developmental mechanisms using genetic, genomic and cell biological approaches. This meeting will cover broad areas of plant development, including sessions on patterning, short and long distance signaling, cell type differentiation, epigenetics in development, and evolution and development. Invited speakers include a combination of worldwide leaders in plant developmental research as well as younger scientists who are in the early stages of their independent careers. The small size of this meeting (approximately 130 participants) will facilitate discussion and insure close and sustained interactions. Three poster sessions are planned. Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will be strongly encouraged to submit poster abstracts; approximately 25% of the speakers will be chosen from these submitted abstracts. Participation by minority and female scientists will also be strongly encouraged; this will be achieved by identification and encouragement of individuals, as well as by advertising the conference widely.
The FASEB summer conference, held at the Vermont Academy in August, has been held every other year for the past twenty-two years and is the only regularly held meeting focused specifically on plant development. As such, it continues to be an important forum for exchange of information and ideas in this field, and has played a significant role in moving the field forward. The meeting was attended by 110 participants comprising students, post docs and faculty. All participants had a chance to speak or show a poster. There was ample time for discussion at the poster sessions, after talks, in the evening and during coffee breaks. Everyone invited to speak at the 2010 meeting agreed to come. Only two speakers cancelled, and health reasons were an issue. Of the 33 invited speakers, 29 did not speak at either of the previous two FASEB meetings, thus diversifying the attendees. Thirteen of the 33 invited speakers were young investigators. The short talks were all from young investigators. Half the invited speakers were women. The meeting was very international with eighteen of the invited speakers coming from overseas, including Australia, Singapore, Japan and several European countries. The topics included patterning in developing tissues, computational approaches to development, responses to the environment, evolution, epigenetics and growth. Funding was contributed by three grants from NSF, DOE and AFRI. We had additional funding from a number of industries including Agrisera, Pioneer Hi-Bred, Plant Biosciences Limited, BASF, Monsanto, Cotton Inc. Funding was also appreciated from the New Phytologist journal and from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. We were able to support all the costs of most invited speakers and almost all the costs of the others. We funded all the graduate students (6) who asked for support.
