Intellectual Merit and Objectives The intellectual merit and objectives of the meeting are to provide an open, inclusive, and interactive forum that provides an effective learning environment for all participants, especially undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. NSF funds are requested to increase the breadth of participation to include many young researchers that have an interest in plant cell biology. The meeting will include oral presentations, posters, workshop, and time for informal discussions.
Broader Impacts The specific objectives are: 1) To provide an open and inclusive forum for oral presentations that allow all labs to share research results. Lead PIs will provide brief 5 minute overviews of each research area to define key knowns as well as important knowledge gaps. Student and post-doc presentations will be geared toward teaching all participants basic methodology as well as data interpretation. Ample time will be devoted for discussion. 2) To provide an opportunity for all participants to present and discuss their results in evening poster sessions. 3) To conduct hands on workshop on fundamentals of fluorescence microsopy, with an emphasis in colocalization analysis. Kevin Eliceiri from the Madison Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation (LOCI) will give a workshop on using ImageJ for data analysis. 4) To provide a forum for students and post docs to publish interesting images in a web based cell image gallery.
This award provided fellowships that increased the participation of students and underrepresented groups in a meeting entitled "Midwest Plant Cell Dynamics". The meeting exposed all participants to cutting edge plant cell biology and the use of quantitative image analyses and computational tools to discover the cellular growth mechanisms of plants. The knowledge gained from this research will drive the development of improved crops of agronomic importance. The oral presentation from keynote speaker Anje Geitmann on computational modeling of tip growing cells and her workshop entitled "Implementation of computational models: entry points and first steps" demonstrated the utility and importance of combining experimental biology with computational methods to understand plant cell growth mechanisms. Dr. Natasha Raikhel gave an important keynote talk on the use of chemical genomics to discover the mechanisms by which the plant endomembrane system is regulated and how that relates to growth. An additional workshop entitled "Image signal quantification" was given by Kevin Eliceiri, LOCI, UW Madison. This workshop provided training on how to effectively utililize ImageJ with a focus on co-localization analyses. Nearly all meeting attendees participated in the workshops. The meeting also included oral presentations from over 25 different labs. Presentations were given almost exclusively by graduate students and post-docs, providing an important training opportunity. Poster sessions were also very successful, providing excellent interactions among students, post-docs, and PIs.
