The Life and Death Decisions of Plant Cells
Plant Programmed Cell Death (PCD) is still a relatively new area of research, but the findings to date suggest its fundamental importance to plant health and development. Despite the potential of PCD research to revolutionize our understanding of defense and developmental processes in plants, our knowledge of how PCD is regulated, and the sequence of events involved, remains fragmented. The workshop "The Life and Death Decisions of Plant Cells" took place at University College Dublin in Ireland on June 14th and 15th, 2023.
The workshop was one of the first meetings exclusively dedicated to discussing PCD as a pathway that intersects plant development, abiotic and biotic stress responses, and the most promising new applications of plant PCD research. Participants working on a range of different aspects of PCD showcased recent progress in the field, including identification of molecular and genetic regulators of this process, resolving spatiotemporal control of PCD events, and technical advances for studying PCD in plants.
The workshop built upon and enhanced the momentum of this dynamically evolving field of research and provided an opportunity to initiate a collective effort to integrate a diversity of data and further elucidate the mechanisms underlying plant PCD. Due to the nature of the workshop format, this meeting was limited to a small number of participants, including early career researchers. However, it created an appetite for holding larger conferences open to all of the plant PCD research community, facilitated discussion on the areas of significant progress and highlighted the future research directions in this field that were identified by the participants.
Organizing committee:
Dr Joanna Kacprzyk (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Prof. Paul McCabe (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Prof. Arunika Gunawardena (Dalhousie University, Canada)
Rory Burke (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Participants:
Dr Laia Armengot (Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics, CRAG, Spain)
Prof. Diane Bassham (Iowa State University, USA)
Dr Maurice Bosch (Aberystwyth University, Wales)
Dr Nicholas Brereton (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Dr Jean-Luc Cacas (National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, INRAE, France)
Marianna Coppola (University of Manchester, England)
Prof. Patrick Gallois (University of Manchester, England)
Prof. Kazuyuki Kuchitsu (Tokyo University of Science, Japan)
Prof. Moritz Nowack (Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, VIB, Belgium)
Prof. Hilary Rogers (Cardiff University, Wales)
Dr Núria Sánchez Coll (Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics, CRAG, Spain)
Sophie Tattrie (Dalhousie University, Canada)
Hannah Vahldick (Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, VIB, Belgium)
Prof. Frank Van Breusegem (Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, VIB, Belgium)