This symposium will bring together a group of specialists from around the world, in order to provide an interdisciplinary overview of the problems and open questions associated with a group called chromalveolates. Members of this group have plastids that arose via endosymbiosis (a phenomenon in which one organism lives inside the body of another and both function as a single organism). Endosymbiosis continues to attract substantial attention as the most plausible explanation for the distribution of plastid features that would otherwise require multiple novel origins of photosynthesis in distantly-related organisms. The tools from genomics, phylogenetics, and biochemistry will be discussed to unlock the mysteries behind the process of plastid endosymbiosis.
Leading researchers in the evolutionary biology of chromalveolates (e.g. diatoms or dinoflagellates) have been invited to participate in the half day symposium on these organisms at the Joint Botany and Plant Biology Congress, in Chicago, July 2007. Where possible, underrepresented groups or minorities were selected to attend the symposium.
