EVENT HIGHLIGHTS

View the Entire Preliminary Schedule

The Joint Congress of the American Fern Society, American Society of Plant Biologists, American Society of Plant Taxonomists, and Botanical Society of America will include a lot of events in addition to the scientific sessions normally provided by the participating societies. Some of the events below are limited availability and require pre-registration. Sign up for them while filling out your online meeting registration form.

The Plant Biology format will include the following Major Symposia and up to 28 Minisymposia based primarily on the abstracts submitted. The Plant Biology Program Committee determines the titles and contents of the minisymposia after reviewing the submitted abstracts.

Undergraduate Networking Poster Session (Saturday afternoon)
Undergraduate attendees are encouraged to attend and display their posters. Students will be free to mingle with each other, various Society leaders, and other meeting participants to share their research, network, and learn how to get the most out of the meeting. Students may take their posters to the main poster area marked for undergraduate posters after the event.

Education Forum (Saturday)
This joint meeting will allow ASPB members to participate in the annual Education Forum that BSA organizes each year in as part of its annual meeting.

Undergraduate Poster Session & ASPB Section/New Member Reception (Saturday afternoon)
Undergraduates are encouraged to attend and display their posters. All sections of ASPB will be represented to answer questions about membership and section activities.

Perspectives of Science Leaders (Saturday evening)
Plant Biology into the 21st Century: Where to from Here?
The awardee of the 2007 ASPB Leadership in Science Public Service Award will present. Speaker: Dr. James Collins, Assistant Director of Biological Sciences at the National Science Foundation, will discuss his perspectives on where biology is today, where it is going, and how plant biology fits in that vision.

Career Workshop I - Where Are The Jobs? (Saturday evening)
Speakers from industry (Christine Ellis, Monsanto; Katherine Krolikowski, Mendel), publishing (Nancy Eckardt, The Plant Cell; Jennifer Henry, Functional Plant Biology), academia (Robert Last, Michigan State University), science policy (Diane Jofuku Okamuro, NSF); and career guidance (Sarah Blackford, Society for Experimental Biology) will give brief presentations about opportunities in their fields and answer questions during the evening. Workshop will begin with dinner. This event requires a pre-purchased ticket.

Career Workshop II - Getting the Most out of the Postdoc Experience (Saturday evening)
This will be a new WIPB workshop organized in response to numerous requests. Speakers will discuss postdoc options in industry and academia (Terry Delaney, University of Vermont); postdoc funding (Sharman O-Neill, UC Davis; Guntram Bauer, Human Frontiers Science Program); research/teaching balance (Sarah Wyatt, Ohio University; Leeann Thornton, Washington University); choosing a mentor and project (Nicole Donofrio, University of Delaware); and what are PI's looking for in a postdoc (Don Ort, University of Illinois). Workshop will begin with dinner. This event requires a pre-purchased ticket.

Education Booth
Throughout the meeting there will be exhibits and displays at the Education Booth. Winners of the Education Booth competition sponsored by ASPB & BSA will be there to share their innovative strategies for education in plant biology. Dr. Paul Williams will present his highly acclaimed Wisconsin Fast Plants exhibit. Free education materials will be available: bookmarks, posters, flyers, and brochures.

Small Colleges/PUI Networking Breakfast (Sunday morning)
This annual event serves as an opportunity to bring people from PUIs together to network, share information on strategies for teaching and research in plant biology, and explore other opportunities.

Minority Affairs Committee Sponsored Speaker and Luncheon (Sunday afternoon)
This luncheon is sponsored by the ASPB Committee on Minority Affairs. Dr. Tuajuanda Jordan will speak on "Will Current Legislative Policies Enhance or Impede the Progress of Underrepresented Minorities Obtaining Degrees in the Sciences?" Dr. Jordan is a senior program officer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, who will be the director of HHMI's new science education center. In addition to her work to develop programs and mechanisms to enhance the training of 21st-century scientists, Dr. Jordan serves on numerous boards and national committees focused on issues related to science education in general; specifically, as they affect under-represented minorities. Before joining HHMI in 2006, Dr. Jordan was an associate professor of biochemistry and served as the associate vice president for academic affairs at Xavier University in New Orleans. This event requires a pre-purchased ticket

Minority Affairs Symposium - Plants and Human Nutrition (Sunday afternoon)
Chaired by Greg Goines, this special symposium will feature Howard Damude - Making a healthy oil even healthier: Production of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in soybeans, Marcella Gilbert - TBA, Ray Rodriguez - Nutritional Genomics: Linking Food, Genomics and Human Health to PRomote Global Health and Wellness, and Eugenia Winston - Genetics and cultural methods to control reniform nematode in cotton.

Botany Plenary Speaker (Sunday evening)
Judge John E. Jones III - In 2005 Judge Jones presided over the landmark case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, after which he held that it was unconstitutional to teach intelligent design within a public school science curriculum.

TAIR/Gramene/SGN workshop I: Gene Ontology and plant Metabolic databases (Sunday Evening)
This workshop is divided into two parts. Part I will focus on describing both the Gene Ontology (GO; http://www.geneontology.org) and the Plant Ontology (PO; http://www.plantontology.org). The GO project has developed three structured controlled vocabularies (ontologies) that describe gene products in terms of their associated biological processes, cellular components and molecular functions in a species-independent manner. Similarly, the PO project has also developed an ontology aiming to describe plant anatomic structures and developmental stages. In addition to explaining the concepts behind GO and PO, and their development, we will demonstrate how they are used for the annotation of gene products across various databases (NCBI, TAIR, AmiGO etc) to help researchers find genes and phenotypes in several species that cause similar alterations to functions and phenotype.
Part II will provide an overview of MetaCyc, a non-species-specific, curated biochemical pathway database. We will present its content and explain how to query the database to retrieve information on pathways, enzymes and genes. We will also demonstrate how MetaCyc can be used to generate species-specific metabolic databases by presenting two such databases: AraCyc (Arabidopsis thaliana) and RiceCyc (Oryza sativa), and demonstrate how they can be utilized for data integration and classification of high throughput data such as microarray or metabolomics experiments.
Speakers: Chih-Wei Tung, Pankaj Jaiswal (Gramene), Tanya Berardini and Hartmut Foerster (TAIR)

Grantsmanship Workshop (Sunday Evening)
Research Program Leaders from NSF, USDA and DOE will provide updates on their research programs and share insights on what contributes to strongly competitive proposals

Digital Art for Introductory and Intermediate Users (Sunday Evening)
Speaker: Michael Hepp of The Sheridan Group
There are a lot of variables to consider when creating figures for submission to a journal. This session will help you to create digital art files that meet the requirements of The Plant Cell and Plant Physiology. The interactive workshop will include live demonstrations in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, along with material on how to prepare figures that will reproduce the finest detail and most accurate color both online and in print. Topics will include color space, resolution, fonts, and file type. The presenter will be Michael Hepp, Technology Strategist for The Sheridan Group, the company that produces Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell. See also the Digital Art Clinic at the ASPB Exhibit Booth on Monday and Digital Art for Advanced Users on Tuesday.

All Society Opening Mixer (Sunday evening)
Open to all meeting registrants, this welcoming event in the Exhibit Hall is a perfect way to reconnect with old friends, meet new people, and network with other meeting participants.

USDA Reception (Sunday evening)
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.

Digital Art Clinic at the ASPB Booth in Exhibit Hall (Monday morning and afternoon)
Visit ASPB's exhibit booth to meet the presenter of our Digital Art sessions, Michael Hepp, who will be available to discuss challenges you've encountered when creating figures for publication.

Education and Outreach Minisymposium (Monday, 8:30 - 10:15 am)
Richard Amasino - "Development of rapid-cycling Brassica rapa as a model for teaching genetics"; Carolyn Napoli and Rich Jorgensen - "Integrating Genomics and Computational Thinking into Biology Education and Outreach"; Brian Gunning - "Images of plant cell biology on DVD: information for students and a resource for teachers" Eve Wurtele - "Meta!Blast: development of a video game of cell and metabolic biology"

Joint Education Workshop "Ideas to Deliverables - Designing and Disseminating Effective Educational Materials" (Monday Evening)
This workshop will bring together people with ideas for education and outreach ventures and those who have successfully implemented such ventures

Women in Plant Biology Committee Sponsored Speaker and Luncheon (Monday afternoon)
This annual luncheon is sponsored by the ASPB Women in Plant Biology Committee for meeting attendees. Dr. Jo Handelsman willaddress issues of women in science in a speech entitled "The Women Don't Need Fixing: The Role of Institutions in Advancing the Participation of Women in Science". Dr. Handelsman is a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In addition to her work on the structure and function of microbial communities, she teaches and writes extensively on science education and the status of women in science. Come and enjoy excellent food, network with fellow students and professionals, meet members of the Women in Plant Biology Committee, and hear from one of today's leading women in science.

Exclusive Poster & Exhibit Sessions (Monday evening, Tuesday afternoon)
Visit exhibitors and view posters while enjoying snacks and beverages during this exclusive session.

Teaching Biology to Undergraduates (Tuesday afternoon)
NSF-Sponsored discussion on the teaching of Biology to undergraduates. What is necessary to reshape undergraduate education in biology to reflect the 21st century approach to the discipline?

TAIR/Gramene/SGN workshop II: Introduction to three plant databases: Gramene, SGN and TAIR (Tuesday evening)
This workshop provides an introduction to three plant databases: Gramene (grasses), SGN (Solaneceae) and TAIR (Arabidopsis).
The Gramene Database (http://www.gramene.org) is a comparative mapping resource for grasses and other model plants such as Arabidopsis. It leverages the use of sequenced genomes of rice, Arabidopsis and maize (currently being sequenced) as an anchor for understanding the biology of plant development, metabolic pathways, functional annotation of genes, genetic maps and markers, QTLs and genetic diversity. During the workshop forward and reverse genetic examples will be used to query the database for finding candidate genes, their functions or the genomics region(s) that express the phenotype of interest. The SGN Database (http://sgn.cornell.edu) is a clade-oriented database (COD) for the Solanaceae, including tomato, potato, pepper, eggplant and petunia, and closely related species such as coffee. The SGN presentation will feature an overview of database content and tools available. Specifically, the sequence database, the gene family database, the interactive comparative mapviewer, the tomato genome project resources, the locus database and the phenotype database will be discussed. Regarding the tools, a focus will be mapping related tools such as the intron detector and CAPS designer tools.
The TAIR Database (http://www.arabidopsis.org) is a global resource the Arabidopsis thaliana research community. It maintains the complete genome sequence and, among other information, gene structure, gene product information, metabolism, gene expression, as well as DNA and seed stocks. This workshop is designed for people who are infrequent or new users of the database. We will cover the basics such as registration and ordering, simple searching and a general orientation about the content of the database.
Speakers: Pankaj Jaiswal (Gramene), Naama Menda, Lukas Mueller (SGN) and Christophe Tissier (TAIR)

Digital Art for Advanced Users (Tuesday Evening)
Speaker: Michael Hepp of The Sheridan Group
If you are familiar with the basic concepts related to creating digital art, this session will cover more advanced topics such as color management, using ICC profiles, and working with MS Office documents and PDFs. It will include live demonstrations of advanced techniques for creating publication-ready figures. The presenter will be Michael Hepp, Technology Strategist for The Sheridan Group, the company that produces Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell. See also Digital Art for Introductory and Intermediate Users on Sunday and the Digital Art Clinic at the ASPB Exhibit Booth on Monday.

Final Party (Tuesday Evening)
Say farewell to your fellow attendees! Have dinner on your own then join us for delicious desserts, drinks, conversation, and dancing to the Grammy award winning band Brave Combo. It will be a night to remember!

ASPT Banquet (Tuesday 6-10 pm)
The ASPT Mixer and Banquet will be held in the Field Museum's Stanley Field Hall, one of the most elegant venues in the country for special catered events.

Field Trips (Saturday, Sunday & Thursday)
New to Plant Biology attendees, these provide an exciting outing to showcase the plant science offerings of Chicago and northern Illinois area.

Workshops (times vary)
A slate of complimentary workshops are planned for the conference and are open to all conference attendees