- About
- Members
- Join
- Member log in
- Membership Renewal
- Member directory
- Life Members
- ASPS Life Member Professor Graham Farquhar
- ASPS Life Member Associate Professor Hendrik (Hank) Greenway
- ASPS Life Member Dr Marshall (Hal) D Hatch
- ASPS Life Member Dr Paul E Kriedmann
- ASPS Life Member Dr Mervyn Ludlow
- ASPS Life Member Emeritus Professor Rana Munns
- ASPS Life Member Conjoint Professor Christina E Offler
- ASPS Life Member Professor (Charles) Barry Osmond
- ASPS Life Member Emeritus Professor John W Patrick
- ASPS Life Member Dr Joe Wiskich
- Corresponding Members
- Elected Fellows
- Events
- Awards & Funding
- Employment
- Publications
- Research
- Teaching
- Menu
Combio2017 – Reminder that the early registration and abstract deadline is Friday, 30 June
26 June 2017
ComBio2017: 2 – 5 October 2017
Adelaide Convention Centre, Adelaide, South Australia
Abstract and Early Registration Deadline, Friday, 30 June 2017
ComBio2017 incorporates the annual meetings of the Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Australian Society of Plant Scientists and the Australia and New Zealand Society for Cell and Developmental Biology.
This is a reminder that the early registration and abstract deadline is next Friday, 30 June.
The program timetable and symposium schedule can be downloaded from:http://www.combio.org.au/combio2017/program.html
and the plenary speakers, together with their photographs and biosketches, can be downloaded from:http://www.combio.org.au/combio2017/plenary.html
As recently advised, as a first, ComBio has been reduced to a three day meeting running from 3 – 5 October, with the popular Career Development Forum being held on 2 October and registration also opening for those who want to beat the morning rush when the conference opens early on 3 October. Due to the shorter meeting, the early member registration fees have been reduced substantially, with the student member early registration fee being $250 and the full member early registration fee being $680. The conference secretariat has also held blocks of very reasonably priced accommodation that are very close to the venue. One bedroom apartments start at $169/night where two people can share and have their own space with a sofa bed in the living room. Two bedroom apartments are only $239/night and this costing is for up to four persons (so would cost $60/night per person with 4 sharing an apartment. There are also limited three bedroom apartments available. The other two hotel blocks held range from $114/night (for up to 2 persons sharing) to 5 star InterContinental accommodation at a modest $205/night (for up to 2 persons sharing). Both of the hotels are a one minute walk to the Adelaide Convention Centre (so next door or directly across the road) and the apartments are only a 7 minute walk. Photographs of hotels and rooms can be seen at: http://www.combio.org.au/combio2017/accommodation.html
All bookings must be made through the conference secretariat when registering or you can phone bookings through to Sally Jay on 08 8362 0009.
The ComBio2017 online registration and abstract submission pages can be accessed at:
http://www.combio.org.au/combio2017/registration.html
and
http://www.combio.org.au/combio2017/abstracts.html
The ASBMB, ASPS and ANZSCDB offer either student bursaries or travel grants, and details are available from:http://www.combio.org.au/combio2017/student.html
Further information: Sally Jay: combio@asbmb.org.au
Call for 2019 ASPS meeting expressions of interest
19 June 2017
Dear ASPS members,
As you will likely be aware, the Sydney 2018 COMBIO will be last annual COMBIO meeting. It will now run as a combined meeting every 2-3 years instead.
ASPS therefore is seeking expressions of interest to hold a 2019 ASPS meeting. This could either be in a city that has traditionally held COMBIO or one that has not. The only criteria is that it is well organised and has costs that are far reduced from COMBIO meetings.
We would like to decide the venue at the next AGM to be held on Thursday 5th October at 2pm at the COMBIO meeting in Adelaide.
We are seeking a venue for approximately 150 people and hoping that costs can be kept to a minimum by using University facilities or similar.
We will leave the timing up to those wishing to host the meeting but out of term time would be good to maximise academic involvement. We envisage that it would be a two day meeting, and we would aim that ASPS and the meeting receipts would subsidize costs for two plenaries from overseas.
As we have a broad membership, in terms of subject content, it would be wise to have at least 2 concurrent streams.
If you are wanting to host the meeting please contact myself (matthew.gilliham@adelaide.edu.au) or our President, Sergey (sergey.shabala@utas.edu.au) to discuss further.
Thanks,
Matt
_________________
ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology
Deputy Head of School (Research)
School of Agriculture, Food and Wine
University of Adelaide
Ph: +61 8 8313 8145 | Twitter: @IonPlants
Lab website: Plant Transport and Signalling Lab
Honorary Secretary, Aust Soc Plant Scientists
Special Bulletin reminder
06 April 2017
Dear Members,
This is a friendly reminder to please take part in the ASPS Membership Survey (as per Email invitation from Wednesday). Your participation is highly valued. You can find the survey here:
Thanks to those that have already answered the five questions. We’ll be back with survey results in the near future.
Your survey team
Your survey team
Uli & Sebastian
Special Bulletin
05 April 2017
|
||||
Special Bulletin
05 April 2017
|
||||
The impact of drought on Australian pulse crops
05 April 2017
ASPS poster award winner Michael Dodt tells a story about his success at COMBIO 2016
My PhD research has focussed on improving our understanding of the impact that drought stress has on Australian pulse crops. My research mainly revolves around four areas of study: photosynthetic responses to drought, root morphology / architecture; crop modelling (APSIM) and transcriptomics (RNA-Seq). A major part of my project has been establishment and evaluation of a novel chemical seed pre-treatment to enhance root development of commercial crops for improved drought tolerance. This fits into our team’s larger project aimed at improving biotic and abiotic stress tolerance of a range of crop species as well as improving nutritional value of crops. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present at COMBIO in 2016 and was thrilled to win the best poster award. COMBIO provided an excellent opportunity to gain experience presenting at a conference and I highly recommend it to all early career researchers – especially if you’re nervous about presenting. This is a great opportunity to gain exposure and confidence in the scientific community. It is an excellent event for PhD students since it’s big and broad enough to fit in comfortably while networking with top tier scientists from multiple disciplines. Speakers were fantastic and there were plenty of opportunities for interaction. I look forward to my next opportunity.
Email: michaeldodt1@gmail.com
Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities, QUT, Brisbane.
March GPC E-bulletin
05 April 2017
Your membership is paid to (year, month, day)
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
March Global Plant Council E-Bulletin
05 April 2017
Your membership is paid to (year, month, day)
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Sambasivam Periyannan – 2016 ASPS Peter Goldacre Award recipient shares his story of success
09 March 2017
SECURING GLOBAL FOOD PRODUCTION BY
RAPID ISOLATION OF WHEAT RUST DISEASE RESISTANCE GENES
Born and raised among the tropical plants on a small farm in Southern India, I never dreamed of becoming a researcher instead of a farmer. With a Master’s in Plant Pathology and a short exposure to the management of diseases in horticultural crops, in 2007, I had the opportunity to migrate to Australia to undertake a PhD at Plant Breeding Institute (PBI), University of Sydney. Until the time, I didn’t realise that PBI is the pioneering centre for fundamental studies on plant-pathogen interactions. With the outbreak of the deadly stem rust fungus Ug99 in East Africa, my PhD project was specifically focused on the molecular genetics of wheat stem rust resistance. At PBI, I was working with Drs Harbans Bariana and Urmil Bansal who are world renowned expertise in identifying and charateristing novel rust resistance genes in wheat. With a year of training on rust pathogenicity, in 2008, I moved to Dr Evans Lagudah’s lab at CSIRO, Canberra to continue the project towards rust resistance gene cloning. I was so excited to join Evan’s lab as it is one among the very few labs of the world which are successful in cloning rust disease resistance genes from the complex wheat genome. Given the complex nature of the wheat genome, it was a challenging project for PhD training. But with emergence of Ug99 as a major threat to global food security, I was highly motivated to succeed and I cloned the first stem rust resistance gene Sr33 from wheat. Further enthusiasm came when the results were published in Science (with cover page highlights) capturing the attention of several media outlets including BBC news (http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23084782).
Du
ring that time, I realised that the wheat and the plant science community as a whole was in need of a robust method for isolating disease resistance genes as the conventional map-based gene cloning was tedious and time consuming. Using the resources of Sr33 and in collaboration with Drs Brande Wulff (at John Innes Centre) and Jonathan Jones’ lab (The Sainsbury Laboratory) at Norwich (UK), a rapid resistance gene cloning tool called “Mutagenesis and Resistance gene enrichment and Sequencing (MutRenSeq)” was developed to identify resistance genes within two years, whilst the map-based approach on average requires five years. This new technology was further validated by the successful isolation of two additional stem rust resistance genes, Sr22 and Sr45, which like Sr33, were effective against Ug99 and other wheat stem rust races. Along with the publication of this method in Nature Biotechnology (as a cover page article), the technique holds a patent in the USA. Apart from wheat, this robust gene cloning technique is currently being extended to other agricultural crops such as barley, soybean, potato, tomato and rye.
With the above achievements, I was fortunate to win the prestigious ASPS “Peter Goldacre Award”. This award contributed to my success in winning a highly competitive Australian Research Council “Discovery Early Career Researcher Award”. My gratitude for both awards has fuelled my hunger for future research success, where I am now identifying the signalling elements and molecular pathways of the cloned rust resistance genes in pathogen infected wheat. As plant pathogens evolve rapidly and become a major problem for securing food production and sustainable agriculture, knowledge of disease resistance gene function is required to help innovate a new generation of robust crops with durable resistance to multiple pathogen varieties.
I would like to acknowledge Sydney University, ACIAR, Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project and Grains Research and Development Corporation for the scholarship and the research grant to undertake the aforementioend studies. Finally, I thank Drs TJ Higgins, Jeff Ellis and Evans Lagudah at CSIRO for nominating me for the prestigous ASPS Goldacre Award.
Email: Sambasivam.Periyannan@csiro.au
References:
- Steuernagel B#, Periyannan S#, Hernandez-Pinzon I, Witek K, Rouse M, Yu G, Hatta A, Ayliffe M, Bariana H, Jones J, Lagudah E, Wulff B (2016). Rapid cloning of disease-resistance genes in plants using mutagenesis and sequence capture. Nature Biotechnology 34:652-655 ( #joint first author)
- Periyannan S, Moore J, Ayliffe M, Bansal U, Wang X, Huang L, Deal K, Luo M, Kong X, Bariana H, Mago R, McIntosh R, Dodds P, Dvorak J, Lagudah E(2013).The gene Sr33, an ortholog of barley Mla genes, encodes resistance to wheat stem rust race Ug99. Science 341:786-788.
Call for 2017 Australian Museum Eureka Prizes
06 March 2017
Your membership is paid to (year, month, day).
Dear ASPS member,
Entries and nominations are now open for the 2017 Australian Museum Eureka Prizes.
We are hoping you can help us reward great Australian science by promoting the following opportunities to your networks. Please read on for more information as well as some options for promotional blurbs you might be able to use in your internal and external communications, newsletters, website or social media.
There are 15 prizes on offer this year including one NEW prize:
Research & Innovation
o NSW Office of Environment and Heritage Eureka Prize for Environmental Research
o University of Technology Sydney Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Science **NEW**
o UNSW Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research
o Australian Infectious Diseases Research Centre Eureka Prize for Infectious Diseases Research
o Johnson & Johnson Eureka Prize for Innovation in Medical Research
o ANSTO Eureka Prize for Innovative Use of Technology
o Defence Science and Technology Eureka Prize for Outstanding Science in Safeguarding Australia
o Macquarie University Eureka Prize for Outstanding Early Career Researcher
o UNSW Eureka Prize for Scientific Research
Leadership
o 3M Eureka Prize for Emerging Leader in Science
o CSIRO Eureka Prize for Leadership in Innovation and Science
o University of Technology Sydney Eureka Prize for Outstanding Mentor of Young Researchers
Science Engagement
o Department of Industry, Innovation and Science Eureka Prize for Innovation in Citizen Science
o Department of Industry, Innovation and Science Eureka Prize for Science Journalism
School Science
o University of Sydney Sleek Geeks Science Eureka Prize (Primary and Secondary School)
Key dates
Friday 10 February Entries open
7 pm AEST Friday 5 May Entries close
Friday 28 July Finalists announced
Wednesday 30 August Winners announced
Copyright 2017 Australian Society of Plant Scientists Disclaimer & Privacy
Website by Michael Major Media