Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS
410 MRAK HALL
DAVIS,CA 95616-8671
Performing Department
Plant Sciences
Non Technical Summary
The Solanaceae encompass many species that are important for agriculture as crops and weeds with tomato and potato providing models for genetic research. Today, several genomes including tomato, pepper, tobacco, petunia, eggplant, African eggplant, nightshade relatives are under way with 1000s of accessions being sequenced in wild and crop lines. The USDA/NIFA Solanaceae Coordinated Agricultural Project provided relevant genomic tools for breeding. These have been rapidly adopted with new tools such as gene editing being developed. The Solanaceae community has been meeting annually worldwide since 2003. The 13th such meeting is being held at a center for Solanaceae research, UC Davis, on September 12-16, 2016. It will focus on translation of research to breeding. Funding is requested to encourage postdoc participation, enhance interaction through tours, and programmatic support. The purpose of the Conference is to communicate research advances in Solanaceous species and to provide opportunities for students and postdocs to develop presentation and professional skills and learning experiences. The focus of the meeting directly addresses Plant Breeding: Area A1141 and incorporates public-private collaborations in funding, speakers and tours. The program is innovative in combining education and plant breeding research in several traditional and interactive formats for students, postdocs, industry and academic researchers, providing opportunity for collaborations and employer contacts in plant breeding and genomics. The Conference web site is: http://solgenomics2016.ucdavis.edu/.
Animal Health Component
60%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
20%
Applied
60%
Developmental
20%
Goals / Objectives
The purpose of the 13th Annual Solanaceae Conference (http://solgenomics2016.ucdavis.edu/) is to communicate research advances in all Solanaceous species and to provide opportunities for students and postdocs to develop presentation and professional skills and learning experiences. The particular emphasis of the 13th Annual meeting will be to highlight advances from genomics and demonstrate their applications for crops and other species.Objective I.Enable attendance by reducing registration costs for postdoctoral fellows. Partial registration re-imbursement ($200) for 50 Postdocs is requested to encourage registration by these scholars. A separate funding request has been made to NSF (award has not been confirmed thus far) to reduce the registration costs for students to $250 each (from $650).Objective II: Offer 8 tours on Thursday morning of the Conference to Solanaceae genetic resource repositories, agricultural production venues and processing facilities in the region.The tours were selected to highlight the diverse resources for Solanaceous crop development and to demonstrate the commercial development pipeline and applications of Solanaceous crop production and processing.The attendees will be transported to the tours by bus and provided with oral presentations, discussions and opportunities to interact with local professionals and directly experience on-site activities at the tour locations. This is particularly important for the conference attendees, many of whom may not have had the opportunity to see activities in California where the majority of the production of Solanaceous crops occurs in the US. Additionally, it provides basic researchers an opportunity to fully appreciate translation of research into production.Attendance at each of the tours is limited by the facilities and the distance from UC Davis.The funding request to the USDA will cover the cost of transportation to the tours.Objective III: Partially cover programmatic support costs for execution of the ConferencePartial funding for the costs to support the tours and the on-site Conference venue are requested. Six of the conference organizers have been working without designated salary for work associated with the conference for seven months. Their activities have included organization of the program, identification of speakers and session chairs, arrangements of facilities, provisions for travel for invited speakers and production of promotional materials, including website updates and on-line and printed notifications. During the conference they will be responsible for on-site registration and conference activities
Project Methods
PROGRAMThe over-all program is focused on the translation of genomics to applications with the meeting title "Advances to Applications". Fourteen oral scientific sessions (ca. 75 speakers total), two poster sessions, two oral poster introduction sessions, four workshops and eight tours related to the improvement of Solanaceous crops comprise the four day conference program (http://solgenomics2016.ucdavis.edu/program/ and below). The conference will be welcomed by The Honorable Karen Ross, the Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture and she will be introduced by UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Dean Helene Dillard. Each of the 85-90 minute scientific sessions has an invited keynote speaker and will include a postdoc or student speaker selected from abstracts, in addition to 3-4 more speakers. Important elements of the program are two oral sessions when 40 graduate students and postdocs will introduce their posters in 1-minute talks. This format has engaged participants and significantly increased interaction in poster sessions in previous meetings such as national Association of Plant Breeders. It also, has resulted in many contacts for employers and students/postdocs. Three concurrent 2- hour workshops in an afternoon session will focus on pathology and bioinformatics resources for the Solanaceae and a fourth workshop, if supported by the NSF funding request, will focus on career opportunities and advancements for newly trained scientists in the agriculture sector with panelists from government, university, foundations and private companies working in genomics, plant breeding, nutrition, education and policy. This panel will be designed to particularly address the questions and future of postdocs and students. A similar panel was led by one of the Conference Co-organizers in January 2016. This panel, attended by about 170 people focused on opportunities for women in the seed industry (http://www.seedcentral.org/pastspeakers.htm).