"Plant Genomics and Beyond" Conference 2011
URGV - Plant Genomics Research
Unité de Recherche en Génomique Végétale

The challenges

In our rapidly changing world, new challenges appear almost on a daily basis, including the global changes of the conditions on our planet or the shrinking oil reserves. Several of these challenges directly target our agricultural system, resulting in increasing demands for a higher food production for a growing population or the replacement of fossile fuels with biofuels. Land and water supplies become limiting and give rise to an explosive political mixture of hunger and social unrest. Science cannot solve many of these problems, and especially not the political ones, but science can provide the knowledge and the means to reduce the losses in agricultural production that are due to biotic and abiotic stresses. Most progress in developing new crop varieties comes from plant genomics.

The conference 2009

"Plant genomics and beyond" was a timely event to bring together the world experts in plant genomics and discuss the latest results and future developments in this area of plant biology. The meeting was held at the URGV Plant Genomics Institute in Evry which is in the south of Paris and is the place where the French national genome and genotyping institutes are located. The conference brought together scientists and students working in all fields of plant genomics. The conference was discussing topics ranging from evolution, cell signaling, domestication, polyploidization and heterosis. Speakers and participants not only discussed progress in basic scientific concepts worked out on plant model species, such as Arabidopsis thaliana. Because emphasis was also laid to apply these concepts to improve agriculture in a sustainable way, the conference also attracted considerable interest from plant breeders and biotech companies. Finally, world leaders gave an outlook into predictive genomics using systems biology concepts linking latest high throughput transcriptome and proteome technologies with bioinformatic appraoches. As such, the conference was highly satisfying and a big success and the URGV are planning a follow-up conference in 2011.