Midwest Section Holds 2003 Annual Meeting

The Midwestern Section of the ASPB held its annual meeting March 21-22 on the campus of Iowa State University in Ames, IA. Steve Rodermel, chair of the Midwestern section, hosted this successful meeting, which drew over 120 attendees from eleven states and featured 36 research talks.

The Midwestern Sectional meeting typically emphasizes presentations by graduate and undergraduate students, and this year was no exception. Twenty-three graduate students and seven undergraduates gave talks on their research, with topics including water relations, metabolism, abiotic stress responses, transport, and genomics. Additional talks were presented by several post-docs and faculty.

The meeting this year was held in conjunction with the ISU Integrated Plant Physiology Major mini-symposium on "Advances in Abiotic Stress Tolerance." This mini-symposium boasted four talks by well-known experts in this important research area. Hans Bohnert (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) spoke about "Microarrays, models and mutants: dissecting abiotic stress tolerance," followed by Norman Huner (University of Western Ontario), who spoke on "The photosynthetic apparatus as an environmental sensor." During the afternoon, Eduardo Blumwald (University of California, Davis) presented the "Role of vacuolar cation/H+ antiporters in ion homeostasis and plant salt tolerance," and Charles Guy (University of Florida) told about "Acquired tolerance to temperature extremes: appreciating the complexity of the associated molecular responses." Following the evening banquet, Hans Bohnert presented the 21st Loomis Lecture at Iowa State University, "Plant Transcriptomes in the Lab and the Real World."

The election for the position of Secretary-Treasurer was held via electronic ballot in April and early May. Three candidates were nominated via the ASPB website: Arun Goyal (University of Minnesota, Duluth), Marianne Laporte (Eastern Michigan University), and Richard Sayre (Ohio State University). Professor Sayre was elected and will serve as Secretary-Treasurer for two years (2003-2005). Karen Koster (University of South Dakota) has now advanced to the position of Vice-Chair, and Allan Showalter (Ohio Uniersity) now serves as Chair of the Section.