GARNet Archives - Page 3 of 5

Summer at GARNet

by Charis Cook

Categories: Arabidopsis, GARNet

Tags: conferences, consultations, GARNet

Comments: No Comments

Published on: June 13, 2014

Cosmos Flower by Alfred Borchard, via Free Images

A summer of conferences

We’re gearing up to go to a few major conferences before our own in September, so watch out for Ruth, Lisa, Jim or me at EPSO, SEB, ASPB, SynBio SEED and ICAR.

There are loads of UK meetings for plant scientists coming up: Early career events New Phytologist Next Generation Scientists, SCI Young Researchers in Agrisciences and Frontiers in Plant Research; Breeding Plants to Cope with Future Climate Change; the CPIB Summer School in Mathematical Modelling; and the HvCP workshops.

If you’re attending these or any other event this summer and want to try your hand at writing a meeting report or blog post, please get in touch – we’re always looking for guest bloggers!

GARNet 2014: The Ongoing Green Revolution

For us, the biggest event of the summer is the finale – GARNet 2014 in September. Our conference is the biggest Arabidopsis event in Europe this year and we have a fantastic line-up, so it’s an unmissable opportunity to catch up with collaborators and colleagues past, present and future. We’re taking early bird registrations and abstract submissions for short talks and posters until 30 June. If you’re a post-doc or PhD student, you could win a bursary to cover the cost of your trip! For more information, go to: http://garnet2014.org/

BIS Capital Consultation

Before all the inspiring talks and networking, we’re working on a response to this BIS consultation about capital investment until 2020. Capital investment in science infrastructure will total over £5 billion between 2015 and 2020, and BIS are asking the whole STEM community for input on how this investment will be managed. GARNet is putting together a response and if you have anything to input, please do email me. If you want to know more, the 110 page consultation document is here. For a bitesize overview, I suggest you take a look at these two excellent Guardian Science Blogs by Stephen Curry and Claire Viney. Also, the Guardian is hosting a live online Q&A session with a panel, to include David Willetts, on Monday lunchtime.

GARNish … coming next week

It can’t really be summer at GARNet without the June edition of GARNish – don’t worry, it will be with you next week!

Plant synthetic biology in Europe

by Charis Cook

Categories: GARNet, synthetic biology

Tags: GARNet, meeting report, synthetic biology

Comments: 1 Comment

Published on: May 20, 2014

On 8-9 May I attended a meeting hosted by PlantEngine to discuss the idea of a synthetic biology repository in Europe. The presentations were varied and interesting, and hopefully the other delegates enjoyed mine (PDF) too,

The meeting was at VTT in Espoo, a city very close to Helsinki. The local host Heiko Rischer gave a brief introduction to VTT, which is a Finnish institute but has bases all over the world. VTT is very separate from the university system, and although fundamental research gets done there it has a big commercial focus and strong links to Finnish industry. For example, VTT developed Arctic cloudberry stem cell technology for cosmetics with the R&D team from Finnish skincare company Lumene Oy.

PlantEngine itself was introduced by lead PI Heribert Warczecha. It is a European network focused on enhancing capacity in plant metabolic engineering by activities like defining target pathways, disseminate new technologies, and setting standards. There are currently over 70 labs in 23 EU countries in the network. They run training schools and workshops, and fund short-term scientific missions – check it out if you’re looking for funding for a short research trip to another lab.

One of PlantEngine’s aims is to explore synthetic biology for engineering plant products, which is the reason for the meeting I attended. (more…)

Report launch: Developing Plant Synthetic Biology in the UK

by Charis Cook

Categories: GARNet, synthetic biology

Tags: GARNet, GARNet workshop, synthetic biology

Comments: No Comments

Published on: March 31, 2014

We’ve been working on the meeting report from last year’s An Introduction to Plant Synthetic Biology workshop for months, so we’re delighted that GARNet Chair Professor Jim Murray is going to launch it tomorrow during his talk at PlantSci 2014!

You’ll be able to download the report, Developing Plant Synthetic Biology in the UK: Opportunities and Recommendations tomorrow on the GARNet website, or if you’re at the conference come and see Jim, Lisa or Charis to get a printed version.

To keep up with all the news from PlantSci 2014, follow #PlantSci2014

Recently in the GARNet community … (3)

by Charis Cook

Categories: GARNet, UKPSF

Tags: GARNet

Comments: No Comments

Published on: February 21, 2014

It’s quietened down in the GARNet office this week and we’ve been catching up on things and preparing for the busy conference season. I’m looking forward to learning how to code with the delegates at our Software Carpentry workshop, and we’re going to Monogram and PlantSci 2014 at Easter too.

We’ve added a new Imaging Resources and Services page to our website. It lists five UK imaging facilities and two suggested resources for new users or students to find out more about biological imaging. The facilities provide a number of services including electron microscopy, in vivo single molecule fluorescence imaging and two-photon microscopy. There are also. Several of the listed facilities have recieved ALERT13 funding for new state-of-the-art equipment which will be available to users through a number of routes.

Nicola Patron, one of the Co-Is on the recently funded OpenPlant Multidisciplinary Synthetic Biology Research Centre, has published a Golden Gate Modular Cloning Toolbox for Plants with Sylvestre Marillonnet, who presented the Golden Gate method at last year’s GARNet conference on plant synthetic biology. The paper (Engler et al., ACS SynBio DOI:10.1021/sb4001504) is free to access, although annoyingly there are hoops to jump through, and the toolbox will be available through Addgene shortly. (edit 14/5/2014: the paper is not free to access)

If you’re a keen writer or interested in science communication, check out this database of science writing competitions. It’s not for plant scientists but it has very useful categories that make it clear whether your country of residence, career, career stage or field of expertise would prevent you entering.

Finally, if you’re a young plant scientist planning on attending PlantSci 2014, don’t forget to submit your abstract to have a chance of being selected to speak – cash prizes are available for the best talks.

Current Status and Future Challenges of UK Plant Science

by Charis Cook

Categories: GARNet, UKPSF

Tags: event, funding, GARNet, Plant Science Status Report, UKPSF

Comments: No Comments

Published on: January 28, 2014

The UK Plant Sciences Federation released UK Plant Science: Current Status and Future Challenges today. It is the product of over a year’s work collecting data and viewpoints from across the UK plant science sector, from researchers like those in the GARNet community to industry scientists, managers in industry and academia, plant breeders and growers, policy-makers and educators.

The report contains the first ever assessment of activities across the UK’s plant science sector. It calls for a doubling of investment in plant science, which currently receives less than 4% of UK public research funding, and urges Government and industry to work together to achieve this.

Jim Beynon, GARNet representative to UKPSF and UKPSF Chair, says: “In addition to increased investment, we need a more concerted approach to ensuring progress in both fundamental scientific understanding and its application for all our benefit. This has not been the case for more than a decade and the adverse impact on skills supply, infrastructure and innovation is now becoming apparent.”

The whole GARNet team have contributed to the report, and we’re excited to be going to the official launch at the Royal Society – consider the above quote from Jim a preview of his speech this evening! We’ll post some photos here later in the week, but in the mean time you can follow the launch virtually on the #UKPSFReport Twitter stream.

Recently in the GARNet community…

by Charis Cook

Categories: Brassica, conferences, funding, GARNet, UKPSF

Tags: conferences, GARNet, news, UKPSF

Comments: No Comments

Published on: January 24, 2014

GARNet news

Lisa and I went to the Brassica Growers Association Conference on Tuesday. I wrote two posts on it over on the UK-BRC website, and Lisa put together a very informative Storify of tweets on the #BGAconference stream.

The UK Plant Sciences Federation has been collecting opinions, facts and data for the past year or so and is now ready to launch a report entitled UK Plant Science: Current Status and Future Challenges. Lisa and I helped out with this report so keep an eye out for it on Tuesday and let us know what you think!

I went to the SEB Synthetic Biology conference last week and have written a short report for the SEB Bulletin about it – I’ll share it when it is published. There was some excellent plant science there. Antonio Scialdone presented the plant-arithmatic work from Martin Howard’s lab – you can read his open access 2013 paper modelling starch degredation over night here (Scialdone et al., eLife 2013;2:e00669). Oliver Ebenhoeh discussed how mathematical models for photosynthesis and plant metabolism can help synthetic biology be done in plants and other photosynthetic organisms.

On the GARNet website

If you missed some January funding deadlines, there are plenty more opportunities to submit your proposal – take a look at the funding round-up on our website for ideas for fellowships, travel, collaborations or straightforward research grants.

Lisa is continuing to write her weekly Arabidopsis research round-up, which you can find on the GARNet news pages. It’s the best way to keep informed of what fellow UK Arabidopsis researchers are up to. This week, papers from GARNet committee members Heather Knight and Cyril Zipfel feature.

Your chance to present your work

PlantSci 2014 is in York on 31 March/1 April, and abstract submission is open until the end of February. There are two £200 cash prizes to be won by early career researchers giving short talks, so make sure you submit an abstract! There won’t be a traditional poster session, but delegates are invited to bring mini-posters to discuss during the networking sessions. Abstracts for the mini-posters will be included in the abstract book.

Further away in September, GARNet 2014 is your second chance to present your work at either a poster session or as a short talk. Registration and abstract submission are both open, and news about special opportunities for students will be coming very soon.

Finally, I’ve been reliably informed that the FSPB/EPSO Plant Biology Conference organisers are looking for proposals for short talks for the Big Data in Plant Science session, so if you’re planning on going and do ‘big data,’ think about submitting an abstract!

Register now for GARNet’s 2014 events

by Charis Cook

Categories: Arabidopsis, bioinformatics, conferences, GARNet, Workshops

Tags: conferences, GARNet, GARNet workshop, Software Carpentry

Comments: No Comments

Published on: January 6, 2014

We have been busy arranging two great events for 2014! Registration for both Software Carpentry for Plant Scientists (9-10 April) and Arabidopsis: The Ongoing Green Revolution (9-10 September) is now open.

On 9-10 April we are hosting a Software Carpentry bootcamp for plant scientists – an Introduction to Programming for Biologists. For those of you who don’t know about Software Carpentry, it is a foundation that teaches good practice in scientific computing, with the aim of providing all scientists with basic, but reliable and transferable, programming skills. If you’ve ever run through the rain to Computing to have a large ChIP-chip dataset split so you can attempt an Excel analysis on it, you’ll know how valuable that is (based on real events – feel free to insert your own experiences there …)!

We’ve worked with the Software Sustainability Institute to develop a programme suitable for both complete beginners and scientists how know their way around the Terminal/Command Prompt but want to improve their skills and learn how to write reliable, re-usable code they can share with their colleagues and collaborators. Registration is £50 and discounted on-campus accommodation is available.

Later in the year, the GARNet general meeting is returning for one time only on 9-10 September at the University of Bristol. Our theme is ‘Arabidopsis: The Ongoing Green Revolution’. We have a line up of excellent speakers, including plenary talks from Alistair Hetherington (University of Bristol), Andrew Millar (University of Edinburgh), Rob Martienssen from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, and Paul Schulze-Lefert and Maarten Koornneef from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research.

The full line-up and registration details can be found by visiting www.garnet2014.org. More information will appear on there closer to the time of the conference. Registration costs £150 for two days, lunch and refreshments on both days, and a drinks reception on the afternoon of 9 September. We’d also love to see you at our conference dinner on the evening of the 9 September at the Bristol Marriott Royal Hotel (£44 per head for three courses and wine on the tables).

Plant science – making an impact on scientific publishing

by Charis Cook

Categories: Arabidopsis, resource

Tags: GARNet, genomics, New Phytologist, Science, TGAC

Comments: No Comments

Published on: September 5, 2013

This year is proving to be a good year for plant science publications. So far there have been special plant science issues in Science and Genome Biology (and I have it on good authority that there will be plant synthetic biology special issue of another journal coming soon) as well as a landmark birthday for New Phytologist.

Special Issues for Plant Science

The open access journal Genome Biology published their Plant Science Special Issue in June 2013. It was guest edited by Mario Caccamo, acting director and Head of Bioinformatics at The Genome Analysis Centre. He discusses the issue and explains the importance of plant genomics, alongside Dale Sanders and other experts, in this podcast from Biome, BMC’s online magazine. The special issue itself features a whole host of UK researchers, including Cristobal Uauy, Sebastian Schornack, Anna Amtmann and Edgar Huitema.

The Science Special Issue, published just last month, unsurprisingly had a much broader focus – Smarter Pest Control. The featured reports take a global look at issues surrounding crop protection from pests, including RNAi-based pesticides, possible health problems caused by traditional pesticides, and tracking the effects of pesticides in wild animal populations.

New Phytologist Celebration

The Lancaster based journal New Phytologist, founded in 1902, is celebrating 200 volumes in October. By my reckoning, it’s the second oldest plant science journal in the world, after Annals of Botany which began life in 1887 as the Journal of Botanical Science (special mention for strictly botany journal, Flora). There is an incredible celebratory Virtual Special Issue of New Phytologist available here, featuring historic articles from throughout the journal’s lifetime including a 1904 critique of the then fashionable field of plant-based ecology from the great man himself, Sir Arthur Tansley.

Arabidopsis UK research roundup

On a related more local note, our new team member Lisa has been searching the literature each week for publications from UK Arabidopsis or other basic plant science researchers. She’s posting the Arabidopsis Research Round-up to the GARNet News pages, so check it out if you want to keep up with new research from your UK colleagues. If you’ve been published and want to make sure we spot your paper (we’re not perfect!), feel free to email Lisa at lisa@garnetcommunity.org.uk to let her know.

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