SolGenomics Meeting Has Newest Advances in Nightshades

Scientists from around the world will present their latest research on nightshades—tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplant and others in the Solanaceae family—at the upcoming conference, SolGenomics: From Advances to Applications.

The meeting will take place in Davis, California, Sept. 12-16, and is the 13^th annual Solanaceae conference to occur. Scientists from several labs at the Boyce Thompson Institute will attend to present their latest findings.

BTI Presentations:

• Assistant Professor Joyce Van Eck will be giving a keynote address entitled “Genetic Engineering and Genome Editing in the Solanaceae.” Van Eck has had great success using CRISPR and traditional genetic engineering techniques with tomatoes and other solanaceous crops.
• Postdoctoral scientist Sarah Hind of the Martin lab will present a talk on the new bacterial receptor that they recently discovered in collaboration with the Schroeder lab. The talk is entitled “Tomato receptor flagellin-sensing 3 binds flgII-28 and activates the plant immune system.”
• Catalá will present research into the genetic regulation of fruit development, in collaboration with Giovannoni and Fei, in a talk entitled “Regulatory variation in tomato: Harnessing genetic diversity to understand the regulation of fruit development.”
• Itay Gonda, a visiting scholar in the Giovannoni lab will present work on genes affecting tomato fruit quality from a collaboration with Mueller, Fei and several other research institutions in his talk, “Combined metabolic quantitative traits loci (mQTL) and expression QTL (eQTL) in a recombinant inbred line population.”
• Yoshihito Shinozaki, a postdoctoral scientist at Cornell University will present a talk on “A high-resolution spatiotemporal atlas of the tomato fruit transcriptome.” This project is a collaboration between researchers in the Catalá, Fei, Mueller and Giovannoni labs, along with scientists at the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University and the USDA Holley Center.
• In addition, researchers in the Mueller lab will be leading a SolGenomics workshop on the genomic tools and resources they have developed for Solanacea research. Mueller will introduce new genomes for varieties of coffee and the model tobacco plant Nicotiana. Postdoctoral scientist Noe Fernandez-Pozo will present the website and its tools and bioinformatics analyst Surya Saha will discuss the tomato build SL3.0 and its corresponding gene annotation ITAG3.0. These resources will be available to the public within the coming weeks.

Several BTI researchers will also be giving posters, including Saha, Fernandez-Pozo, Gonda, visiting scholar Anquan Wang, and postdoctoral scientists Ari Feder and Philippe Nicolas.