59th Annual JSPP meeting

a short review from Hokkaido, Japan

This year’s annual meeting of Japanese Society of Plant Physiologists (JSPP) was in the northern part of Japan, Sapporo city, from 28 – 30 March. It’s comparatively colder region compared to the last year’s venue, Kagoshima. Sapporo is the capital of Hokkaido and famous for beer and skiing resorts. The exact conference venue was Sapporo Convention Center.

The Sapporor Convention Center from the outside

Entrance of the conference venue

Like any other recent conference, they have provided the conference app. The app was really convenient to navigate the interested talk.

The conference updates were covered by researchers through #JSPP2018 hastag.

This year around 1,500 researchers joined from all over the world. But, like any other JSPP meeting, Japanese attendees were the majority of the crowd. In three days, there were 9 major symposiums on RNA-mediated plant behaviors, Evolution of C4 photosynthesis, Developmental phenomena in plants, Plant reproduction from cell biology perspective, Stem cells in plants and animals, Oxygen and active molecular species, Autophagy and ubiquitin systems, Chemical biology, Ribosome and translation regulation in plants. The major symposiums were in English. In the “Autophagy and ubiquitin systems” symposium, 2016 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, Ohsumi Yoshinori, talked about his 40 years of research to identify autophagy mutants.

Ohsumi Yoshinori, after his talk

He briefly described how his research started with the plant vacuoles and extended to yeast system later on. His talk (Lessons from Yeast – a Cellular Recycling System) was a profound example of how the basic research from plant science is crucial and easy to translate to other systems as well as.

Oral presnetation session

Oral presnetation session

Apart from the major symposiums, there were 414 oral and 420 poster presentations in total. But, the majority of the presentations were not in English. Most importantly, taking pictures were strictly prohibited, which was a complete disappointment. Exception is if the presenter allows or permits to take snap during his/her talk and poster.

Poster presentation session (Day 1)

Poster presentation session (Day 2)

Poster presentation session (Day 3)

In the 14th Database workshop, they have covered National BioResouece Project (NBRP) Plant database, Melonet-DB, Basics of deep neural network, Oxford Flower Image Dataset.

In the exhibition section, commercial companies, educational booth, Plant Biology society and journals were present.

ASPB booth

The conference dinner was the great opportunity for socializing.

Conference dinner

Conference dinner

Conference dinner

Conference dinner

It was an awesome event for grad students like me to find friends and discuss with researchers.

Me with Jose Alonso after his talk

Hopefully, this short review will help to get some idea about the event. I would like to thank the organizers (@PCP_EIC) to share their official photos for this blog post. The next year it’s going to be in Nagoya! See everyone there in 2019!