Snapshot and summary from Turku (ICAR 2018)

29th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research

Update: ICAR2018 is finished, we’re looking forward to ICAR2019 in Wuhan, China, and ICAR2020 in Seattle, USA.

Suayib Üstün pulled together the data for the Twitter activity for #ICAR2018 – it’s interesting reading! As one person observed, you can see a clear pattern of circadian activity in the Tweets – see more at https://www.tweetbinder.com/rs…

If you’d like to know more about the world-wide activities of the Arabidopsis community, check out the annual report of the Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee (MASC).

http://www.arabidopsisresearch…

So the question is, will we see a similar pattern of Twitter activity in the upcoming#PlantBio18 meeting?

This week is ICAR week – the International Conference on Arabidopsis Research. It’s the 29th annual conference, and a few of the attendees were at the very first ICAR meeting! ICAR moves around the world in a 3-year rotation (Americas / Europe / Asia), and this year it is being held in Turku Finland. (2019 it will be in China, and 2010 North America).

As always the conference features excellent plenary speakers as well as talks submitted from abstracts – see the full program including the abstract book here http://icar2018.arabidopsisres…

Day 1 featured two Keynote speakers, Alison Smith from the John Innes Centre and Dominique Bergmann from Stanford University, and concluded with a welcome reception at a brewery with a beer garden where participants could enjoy the long Nordic summer evening.

Day 2 featured Plenary sessions on shoot development and abiotic interactions, followed by concurrent sessions on organelle biology, biotic interactions and systems biology. Next were several concurrent workshops on topics including emerging plant models, microscopy methods, organelle signaling and other topics. After posters, some of us went on an elective boat tour of the area, including a stop at an island for an outdoor dinner.

We’re getting ready for day 3 – if you’d like to follow along, download the program and follow the conference hashtag #ICAR2018!  Today features root development, biotic interactions, evolution and ecology, photobiology and genomes and chromatin – I can’t wait!