There is an urgent need to increase global crop production to meet the food, fiber and bio-fuel demands of our growing population. The major focus of the Keystone Symposia meeting on Plant Abiotic Stress and Sustainable Agriculture will investigate how crops can be modified to enhance productivity in extreme environments, such as the extremes in water availability and temperature, salinity, nutrient deficiency and other factors associated with global climate change. This grant supports the participation of graduate students at this meeting.
The Keystone Symposia meeting on Plant Abiotic Stress and Sustainable Agriculture: Translating Basic Understanding to Food Production was conceived and organized around the central goal of highlighting progress in the dissection of the molecular basis of abiotic stress tolerance and the practices that enable rapid translation of abiotic stress tolerance to the farmer's field. The program emphasized three main topic areas: plant abiotic stress adaptation/acclimation mechanisms, cell growth and development processes, and crop yield and biomass production. A primary objective was ot update and exchange novel recent research results in each topic area and identify major critical research questions in each. This meeting also sough to integrate results gained from cellular or organismal based research that utilizes cross-disciplinary (e.g., genetic, biochemical, physiological) approaches to study basic processes such as genetic mechanisms, signaling, ion transport, metabolism, and growth and development (yield). This 4-day meeting was designed to gather public sector and commercial scientists who have different perspectives for outcomes and research objectives but share common understanding of the underlying science and its translational utility. Additionally, the program design helped to facilitate the identification and networking of critical mechanistic interconnections from discoveries in each area into a systems perspective about yield and biomass production in abiotic stress conditions. Plenary and short talks, workshops, poster sessions and unstructured informal discussions were all used to address key issues in plant abiotic stress tolerance research. More specifically, this meeting provided an opportunity for scientists from different but relevant fields of plant science research to discuss recent results to provide comprehensive and more integrative understanding of abiotic stress tolerance mechanisms, particularly those that alleviate stress effects that compromise yield and biomass production. In addition, the meeting facilitated discussion of translational approaches for crop improvement. Recent and substantial advances in each field made the symposium timely and appropriate to define future research directions, including integrative opportunities, and provided a framework with translational potential. Thus, the meeting provided a unique forum for scientists working in plant abiotic stress tolerance research, and sought to foster enduring interactions and collaborations between these disciplines. In addition, the conference provided a forum for a diverse plant science group to communicate important new results and identify future research directions to meet global population demand for food, fiber and other bioresources. Individuals whose research focuses on plant abiotic stress tolerance mechanisms, cellular growth and development processes, and biomass and crop yield production improvement met through this unique program to advance knowledge and understanding within and across fields that can translate to crop improvement. There were 99 total attendees at the meeting. Attendees at this meeting were diverse with regard to gender, ethnicity, stage of career, and institutional affiliation. More specifically, 37% of the meeting participants were female researchers, and ~2% of all attendees (or ~4% of attendees who were US citizens or permanent residents) self-identified as scientists from under-represented minority groups. The meeting was highly international, drawing 42% non-US attendees. Approximately 27% of attendees were students and postdoctoral fellows. The meeting provided ample opportunity for training and professional development. Trainees and newer investigators were exposed to dozens of high-quality oral presentations by more senior investigators, who served as models for high-quality research and communication skills. Plenary sessions also included short talks drawn from submitted abstracts, and the majority of these presentations (8 of 12 short talk presenters) were given by students, postdoctoral trainees and newer investigators (e.g., Katharina Brautigam, Sharon Gray, Amandeep Mittal, Hilde Nelissen and Mattew Siebers). Two poster sessions provided opportunities for trainees and newer investigators to share their research and to discuss this research with more experienced investigators. Finally, the unstructured portions of the meeting and the retreat-like venue provided significant and generous opportunities for productive informal interactions between trainees, newer investigators and more senior investigators. We assessed outcomes with regard to attendee perceptions of the quality and impact of this meeting through post-conference surveys sent via email. We received responses from 66 (66%) attendees. the survey results demonstrated that attendees felt that the meeting was of high quality and value. Fro example, 94% rated the scientific content as very good to excellent, and 77% of respondents agreed with the statement "I made a contact at this conference that I anticipate will lead to a collaboration or sharing of information, data or techniques." In summary, this Keystone Symposia meeting provided a unique forum for substantive cross-field dialog and critical discussion, engaged scientists who typically do not meet together in small gatherings, and facilitated de-compartmentalization of basic research knowledge and integration of this knowledge for crop improvement in abiotic stress environments. Individuals from public academic and research institutions, and private commercial enterprises shared up-to-date, including unpublished, results, exchanged scientific objectives and approaches, and coalesced this information into creative concepts and approaches for translation to crops.
