Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) Annual main meeting 29 June – 2 July 2012
The environmental control of development
Organised by: Karen Halliday (University of Edinburgh - karen.halliday@ed.ac.uk) and Miriam Gifford (Warwick University - miriam.gifford@warwick.ac.uk)
The interaction between an organism and its environment is complex, particularly for plants that are sessile and must cope with environmental extremes. Plant growth and development is highly plastic so that plants can be responsive to conditions and therefore grow, flower and set seed at optimum times for maximum production. If we are to develop ways to ensure food security in a changing climate we must understand the mechanisms by which plants integrate and respond to multiple environmental factors. This will enable us to harness the plasticity to develop crops that can withstand unfavourable conditions whilst still retaining yield.
This session focuses on modelling the interaction between the environment and plant development. The approaches taken are diverse, from agronomic modelsexploring the how plants interact with their physical environment, through to gene network reconstruction to understand the fine-tuning of environmental signal integration. All work in this session aims to understand multiple layers of the plant’s response to a dynamic environment.
Invited speakers include: Mikhail Semenov (Rothamsted Research), Cris Kuhlemeier (University of Bern), Marc Knight (Durham University), Steve Penfield (University of York), Lionel Dupuy (The James Hutton Institute), Christian Fleck (University of Freiburg), Ida Ruberti (Istituto Biologia e Patologia Molecolari CNR), Paul Devlin (Royal Holloway, University of London), Phil M Mullineaux (University of Essex)
For more information and booking instruction please see website: Poster http://www.sebiology.org/meetings/Salzburg2012/Salzburg.html