SPECIAL EVENTS - Please check this page regularly; information about these and other events will be added as it becomes available.

The following provides details on special events to be held at Plant Biology 2010 in the following broad categories:

Funding | Networking | Careers | Education | Resources & Information

Opening Address, ASPB/CSPP 2010 Awards Ceremony, and Award Speakers
Saturday, July 31, 1:00 – 3:15 pm

All attendees are invited to attend this prominent annual ceremony, which recognizes meritorious research and service in plant biology by the presentation of awards to deserving individuals. The ASPB and CSPP presidents will each present their society's’ 2010 awards. The ceremony is immediately followed by the ASPB 2009 award speakers: Charles Albert Shull Award - Steve Jacobsen; Stephen Hales Prize - Jeff Dangl; and the 2010 Perspectives of Science Leaders awardee - Nina Fedoroff, Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State and to the Administrator of USAID.

FUNDING

NIH 101 (view presentations)
Monday, August 2, 7:30 – 9:30 pm

Speakers: Cheryl A. Kitt, Ph.D., Deputy Director, Center for Scientific Review, NIH; and Michael Bender, Ph.D., Program Director, Division of Genetics and Developmental Biology, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, NIH

NIH program and review representatives will present an overview of NIH research funding missions and application and review processes. Topics covered will be the intersection of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) research mission with plant biology and recent changes in peer review of research grant applications at the NIH.

Government Agencies Room - Learn about Funding Opportunities from U.S. Government Agencies!
This year the NSF, USDA, and DOE will have a meeting room dedicated to providing you with information about funding opportunities.  Agency staff will be available throughout the meeting.  Schedules will be available at registration and at the U.S. government agencies exhibit booth. 

NETWORKING

Opening Reception/Mixer
Saturday, July 31, 7:00 - 9:00 pm
(complimentary for attendees, non-registered guests $10)
Visit with friends and colleagues and check out the exhibits while enjoying a relaxing evening.

ASPB Women in Plant Biology - Sponsored Lunch and Speaker
Monday, August 2, 12:00 - 1:30 pm
(pre-purchased ticket required; $12 for students/post docs, $28 for regular members)
Speaker: Shirley Malcom, Head of the Directorate of Education and Human Resources of AAAS,- Women's Career Choices: Finding the Third Way

What are the factors that determine women's career choices in science? Indications are that women don't find their way into academic positions in equal proportions to men. Why is this? Is this choice a reflection of reduced ambition? Or is it that the research institutions in which they are trained do not create an environment that welcomes women as long-term players? In addressing these questions, Dr. Malcom will provide background information, discuss helpful approaches, and identify policies that have been shown to result in greater inclusion of women in science departments.

ASPB Minority Affairs Committee Sponsored Dinner and Speaker
Monday, August 2, 7:30 - 9:00 pm
(pre-purchased ticket required; $12 for students/post docs, $28 for regular members).
Speaker: Tyrone Hayes, University of California, Berkeley - From Silent Spring To Silent Night: A Tale Of Toads And Men

The herbicide atrazine is a potent endocrine disrupter that chemically castrates and feminizes exposed male amphibians. Further, atrazine exposure results in neural damage and hyperactivity and induces a hormonal stress response that leads to retarded growth and development and immune suppression. The immune suppression results in increased disease rates and mortality. Though many factors likely contribute to amphibian declines, pesticides (such as atrazine) likely play an important role even in populations that appear to decline for other reasons, such as disease. Pesticides like atrazine are ubiquitous, persistent contaminants and, though more pronounced in amphibians, the effects described above occur in all vertebrate classes examined (fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals) via common mechanisms. These observations demonstrate the critical impact that pesticides have on environmental health. Furthermore, reproductive cancers and birth defects associated with exposure to many of these same chemicals (e.g. atrazine) via identical mechanisms demonstrate that the impact on environmental health is an indicator of a negative impact on public health. Many of these mechanisms are being revealed only now in the scientific literature, and agencies (such as the US Environmental Protection Agency) are ill-equipped to deal with this emergent science and translate it efficiently into health-protective policies. In particular, ethnic minority and lower socioeconomic communities are at risk as they are more likely to live in contaminated communities and work in occupations that increase hazard exposure and less likely to have educational and healthcare access. Given the importance of this science and its relevance to public health, there is a strong need to translate this information and provide public access to this knowledge. Command of the science and active involvement by the public in policy decisions is vital.

Undergraduate Networking Poster Session
Saturday, July 31, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Visit the future of plant biology as undergraduates display their posters during this special session. Undergraduates may move their posters to the exhibit/poster hall after this event if an abstract was submitted for the regular poster sessions.

Small Colleges/PUI Networking Lunch
Monday, August 2, 12:00 – 1:30 pm
(pre-purchased ticket required; $15 presale/$20 onsite, includes lunch),
This workshop is targeted toward scientists working at or interested in PUIs who want to to network, discuss issues of common interest, find out about PUI-related opportunities, and provide feedback on ASPB programs for PUIs.

USDA Reception
Sunday, August 1, 7:00 - 8:00 pm
All employees of the U.S. Department of Agriculture are invited to attend this annual reception. Enjoy the opportunity to share a beverage and mingle with this diverse group.

Final Party
Tuesday, August 3, 9:00 pm – 12:00 am at the Palais des congrès
(complimentary for attendees; non-registered guests $10),
Get totally tubular! Come enjoy 80s dancing, dessert and drinks.

CAREERS

Career Workshops I & II
Held concurrently on Sunday, August 1, 7:00 - 10:00 pm
(pre-purchased ticket $12, includes dinner),
The ASPB Women in Plant Biology Committee will present two career workshops at Plant Biology 2010. These workshops are open to all annual meeting attendees.

Career Workshop 1: Getting the Most out of Graduate School
Graduate students often enter graduate school with little knowledge of the skills they will need for success in a scientific career. Not only do they need excellent lab skills, but they also need to be reading the literature, reading and writing manuscripts, reading grant proposals, developing teaching skills, and attending meetings where they present their data and get experience in networking.  In addition, graduate students need to work well with their mentor and others in their research program.  This workshop will bring in experienced PIs and postdocs to discuss strategies for success in graduate school.

Career Workshop II: Is Industry the Right Choice For You?
Industry is often considered as a career option, but academic labs rarely have much knowledge of careers in industry.  This workshop will bring together scientists who work in small and large companies to provide an insider’s guide to the pros and cons of a job in industry.

EDUCATION

Education Booth Hot Topic Discussions
In addition to other formal events, the ASPB Education Committee will be hosting "hot topics in science education" discussions during the Plant Biology meeting this year. These 30- to 60- minute informal sessions will take place in the Education Booth and will focus on strategies for broadening the impact of your research, assessing student learning, and other education-related topics of interest to the members. Please watch for announcements of these sessions on the website and during meeting. If you would like to suggest a topic or facilitate a discussion, please email Erin Dolan, ASPB Education Committee chair.

Education Workshop - Education and Outreach: Strategies for Broadening the Impact of Your Research
Sunday, August 1, 7:30 - 9:30 pm
(Free - pre-reserved ticket is required)

Are you looking for ways to integrate your research into your undergraduate teaching? For lab lessons that illustrate plant biology concepts without reading like a cookbook recipe? For ways to get children and the public excited about science? Then come to the Education Workshop and learn why and how to broaden the impact of your research through K-16 education and K-12 outreach. The workshop will feature hands-on activities and examples of open-ended investigations, as well as advice about finding funding for education and outreach efforts and evaluating their impact.

RESOURCES & INFORMATION

Plant Ontology and Gramene's Gene Annotation Workshop
Saturday July 31, 8:00 am - 12:00 pm
(Free - pre-reserved ticket required)

Sponsored by NSF Funded Projects, Gramene Database & Plant Ontology
As more and more plant species are getting sequenced and large-scale phenotyping screens are being setup, we see a diversity of annotation types and descriptors being used for these experiments. Having a new genome and large datasets are an excellent way forward to find novel ways to learn about plant development and behavior. However, in doing so we also realize that many of the descriptors are either very species specific and/or do not meet the community standards of functional characterization by use of various ontologies such as Gene Ontology and Plant Ontologies. In addition to that not, every plant community has suffiecient personnel and resources to manage the annotation of its genome. Therefore, these communities depend heavily on the high-quality annotations of the Arabidopsis, rice and corn datasets. Henceforth, in order to create gold-standard datasets that can be used in annotations, we want to train the plant biologists with emphasis on young investigators, students, postdocs and especially those representing the minority and underrepresented institutions to help us forster good practices and build a community of curators that will undertake the task of creating a gold-standard dataset for plant biologists. A few laptops will be available; but bringing your own is encouraged. Internet access will be provided.

The iPlant Collaborative: New tools for innovative plant biology research
Sunday August 1, 12:00 - 2:30 pm
(Free - pre-reserved ticket is required, lunch provided)

Sponsored by iPlant Collaborative
This workshop will provide an overview of the iPlant Cyberinfrastructure (CI), details on two Grand Challenge projects, and iPlant’s education and outreach activities. iPlant is building CI that will include user-centric, configurable “Discovery Environments” (DEs) designed to address Grand Challenge problems, data repositories available to the community, new and refactored tools optimized for growing demands, and developer toolkits to harness the power of the underlying system. iPlant is currently building CI in support of two Grand Challenges. iPlant’s Tree of Life (iPToL) project seeks to enable construction of phylogenetic trees for up to 500,000 species of green plants to enable the dissemination of data associated with large trees, visualize large trees, and implement scalable "post-tree" analysis tools to foster integration with other sciences. The iPlant Genotype to Phenotype (iPG2P) project seeks to support an analytical process that allows one to begin with a trait of interest in a species possessing limited genetic resources and progress towards the ability to predict trait scores for known genotypes in given, non-constant environments. iPlant’s CI will also serve as the foundation for development of educational software, in which students can use the same tools and data resources that are available to professional scientists.

Metabolic Pathway Databases and Tools: PMN/MetaCrop/KEGG Joint Workshop
Sunday, August 1, 7:30 - 10:00 pm

Sponsored by The Plant Metabolic Network, Carnegie Institution
PMN - Speaker: Peifen Zhang
PMN develops and curates plant metabolic pathway and enzyme databases. We provide single-species databases that were reconstructed from sequenced plant genomes as well as one comprehensive all-plant reference database called PlantCyc. Tools provided at PMN allow users to display and examine large-scale “omics” data in a metabolic context, to compare pathways between species, and to BLAST against specific enzyme datasets.
MetaCrop - Speaker: Falk Schreiber
MetaCrop is a manually curated repository of high-quality information concerning the metabolism of major crops with high agronomical importance. This includes pathway diagrams, locations, transport processes, reaction kinetics, taxonomy and literature. The web interface and services connect MetaCrop with many tools. MetaCrop also allows model creation and automatic data export therefore supporting systems biology approaches.
KEGG PLANT - Speaker: TBA
We introduce recent topics of the KEGG database from the viewpoint of linking genome and metabolome of plants as implemented in the KEGG PLANT interface. KEGG PLANT not only integrates plant related resources in KEGG, but also interfaces to various analytical tools such as KAAS for genome and EST annotations and PathPred for predicting biosynthesis pathways of plant secondary metabolites.

Tips and Troubleshooting for Quantitative and Qualitative Immunoblotting of Photosynthetic Organisms Workshop
Monday August 2, 12:00 – 1:30 pm
(Free - pre-reserved ticket is required, lunch provided)

Sponsored by Agrisera and Environmental Proteomics NB Inc.
Given by Dr. Amanda Cockshutt CEO of Environmental Proteomics and Assitant Professor of Biochemistry at Mount Allison University, this workshop will go over a number of Western Blotting techniques and application with specific emphasis on working with photosynthetic samples. The workshop will discuss sample harvesting, protein extraction methods, electrophoresis methodology, sample loading considerations, antibody choices, and incubation parameters. There will be an interactive section on troubleshooting with an attempt to engage the audience in their own challenges and experiences. The workshop is relevant and important, as much of the literature and applications of immunoblotting techniques are for animal studies. Special considerations and conditions need to be applied to immunoblotting protocols for photosynthetic organisms. We will present material relevant to those working on plants and algae.

Guidelines for Preparing Digital Art Workshop,
Monday, August 2, 7:30 - 10:00 pm

Speaker: Michael Hepp of The Sheridan Group
Sponsored by Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell
There are a lot of variables when creating digital art. What software are you using? What size should the figure be? In which format should it be saved? We can help you create publication-ready figures from the beginning so you won’t have to spend time fixing problems later. This presentation will address the basics of digital art preparation for less experienced attendees, and it will also expand to more advanced topics for those who are more experienced. There also will be time at the end of the session for questions. There will be demonstrations in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, along with information on how to prepare figures that will reproduce the finest detail and most accurate color both online and in print. The presenter will be Michael Hepp, Technology Strategist for The Sheridan Group, the company that produces Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell.

TAIR & SGN Workshop
Monday August 2, 8:00 – 9:30 pm

The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) and Sol Genomics Network (SGN) curators will introduce researchers to the rich datasets present in these model organism databases to promote basic and applied plant biology research. The presenters will demonstrate how to connect  research in Arabidopsis and the Solanaceae clade (including tomato, potato, and petunia) and how to link these databases to many other model and crop species. Additional topics to be covered include the TAIR10 genome release, tomato genome resources, evaluating the reliability of Arabidopsis gene structure and function data, linking Solanaceae genomes to phenomes, TAIR's new community annotation interface, and SGN's community curation tools.

Events listed above are available when registering. Already registered? Add it to your registration right online!