This award will support the participation of ten U.S. scientists in a U.S.-Japan Seminar on Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of Membrane and Storage Lipids of Plants, to be held December 14- 16, 1992 in Kona, Hawaii. The co-organizers are Professor Christopher Somerville, Plant Research Laboratory, Michigan State University, and Professor Norio Murata, Department of Regulation Biology, National Institute for Basic Biology, Okazaki, Japan. This seminar will provide a forum for representatives of the major academic and industrial research laboratories in the United States and Japan, as well as major academic research groups in four European countries, to exchange up to date information and explore possible collaboration. The significance of the topic of the seminar lies in the fact that membrane lipid composition is thought to be a major component of chilling tolerance in higher plants. In addition, the composition of dietary vegetable oils has significant health effects and the composition of non-food oils determines the utility of the oils for a wide range of non-food industrial applications. Recent advances in plant molecular biology have raised the possibility of using genetic engineering techniques to modify oil composition and the cold tolerance of plants by rational genetic modification of crop species using cloned genes. Since most of the research groups with expertise in both biochemistry and molecular biology are in the United States and Japan, their meeting in this seminar along with some of their European colleagues should prove fruitful.
