This proposal requests funds to help pay international travel and accommodation costs of North American scientists participating in the Fourth International Conference on Phloem Transport and Assimilate Compartmentation. The conference will be held in Cognac, France from August 19 through 24, 1990. Scientists will focus on the specific processes that are involved in orchestrating the development of the long-distance transport system of the plant (the phloem in particular) and form a framework for the integration of events from the cellular, tissue and whole plant level. The last conference in this series, held at Asilomar, California, focussed on the controversies surrounding the interpretation of experimental data. Since then, the emergence of plant molecular biology has provided new avenues by which to study the phloem and these approaches will be presented for discussion at the Cognac meeting. In addition, the program is designed to integrate structural, physiological and biophysical studies in a manner that should potentiate conceptual and experimental advances. The format of the Cognac meeting has been designed to allow those who attend to be exposed to related areas of translocation. The meeting will be a true "workshop" in that the program contains a balance of invited special lectures, formal group discussions on predetermined topics, group discussions on topics identified by conference participants as being in need of research focus (so called trouble spots), review periods during which the international representatives from each country will discuss strategies that will foster and encourage the coordination of research efforts in this important area of plant biology.
