This project will promote interactions between biologists who are using different scientific approaches to show how the major sources of our food, fuel and shelter -plants- grow and develop. These interactions will take place at the 14th International meeting on Mechanisms in Plant Development, which will be held from August 2nd-7th, 2015 in Saxton's River, Vermont, USA. This meeting is the only regular international conference devoted entirely to plant developmental biology, which is the study of how plants grow and how they are able to make different structures, such as leaves, fruits and grains, that are critical to our agricultural economy. It is hoped that discoveries in developmental biology will help design better crops for food and biofuel production, as well as reducing the impact of agriculture on the environment. This particular project is special because of the small size and secluded location of the meeting, which make it a fantastic opportunity for discussion of new ideas and emerging concepts. The conference will also promote education of a diverse group of scientists at all career levels. Graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and young faculty will be strongly encouraged to submit poster abstracts, and approximately one third 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 results of the conference will be summarized by meeting participants and made available to the general public through posting on developmental biology hubs such as "The Node" and on the organizer's public websites. Materials will also be provided directly to participants to spread the exciting new findings presented at the meeting.
This conference is an important and unique scientific meeting where the intersections of plant development, signaling, modeling and genomics are explored through talks, poster sessions, and intensive scientific discussion. The meeting includes outstanding researchers from around the world, presenting cutting edge research directed towards a fundamental understanding of how different aspects of plant growth and development are controlled in response to intrinsic and external signals, and how such mechanisms are modified over evolutionary time. This meeting will cover broad areas of plant development, including sessions on local and long-range signals, the interface between cell and developmental biology, new approaches to modeling development and plants emerging as new models for important developmental traits. This year, in particular, the meeting organizers have planned to include more plant/environmental interactions (be they biotic or abiotic) because new technologies and their life histories make plants especially well suited to lead the way to understanding the positive and negative interactions between a complex macroscopic organism and the world around it.
