Innovations in plant science are needed to tackle global sustainability, food security and human health. Plants not only form the foundation of terrestrial ecosystems and the human food supply, but also provide renewable energy and essential medicines. The goal of this workshop is to bring together scientists from the fields of data science and bioinformatics, imaging, proteomics, single cell profiling and nanotechnology to brainstorm and develop tools to lay the groundwork for creating a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic molecular organization of the plant cell, an initiative we are calling the Plant Cell Atlas. A Plant Cell Atlas will become a crucial resource for the scientific community to address basic, long-standing questions in biology that relate directly to grand challenges in food security and climate change. This community will leverage and extend a number of revolutionary technologies and techniques and be poised to create new techniques. This conference will foster a network of young and established scientists. We will proactively recruit participants from underrepresented scientists and junior faculty, postdocs and graduate students.
This workshop aims at starting a community of interdisciplinary scientists to meet and brainstorm about broader directions the Plant Cell Atlas initiative should take, the challenges it might pose on the way and how to be prepared to meet those challenges. The workshop also aims to foster interaction with and input from the leading scientists of the Human Cell Atlas project by inviting some of them to share their perspectives and participate in workshop activities. The workshop will feature presentations of initial data, along with broader ideas, in the form of invited talks and short talks from abstracts. In addition, breakout sessions and panel discussions will be organized around topics including technical challenges, community wants and needs, and the conceptual goals of the plant cell atlas. These activities will facilitate interaction and networking among the participants of this initiative. We anticipate various proposal concepts and collaborations to form from this gathering.
This award was co-funded by the Cellular Dynamics and Function and Genetic Mechanisms clusters of the Division of Molecular Biosciences and the Plant Genome Research Program of the Division Integrative Organismal Systems.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
