Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Course: Frontiers & Techniques in Plant Science

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spg Hbr NY

Investigators

Abstract

Intellectual Merit. For thirty years, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory summer course on Frontiers and Techniques in Plant Science has played a critical role in disseminating new approaches and techniques to a wide plant science community. The course is continuing this tradition with a focus on new genomic, analytical, computational and other high throughput and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding plant biology. The intention is to (1) teach state-of-the-art techniques to scientists already involved in plant research so that they can apply these technologies to their own future research and (2) introduce scientists familiar with microbial, animal or plant systems to cutting-edge research carried out by top plant biologists. The goal of the course is to immerse students in a handful of key topics in plant biology--evolution; form and function; genetic mechanisms; interactions with the biotic and abiotic environment; and engineering plants for food, pharmaceuticals, and fuel--employing a format that includes a vigorous lecture series, a hands-on laboratory, and informal discussions. The curriculum emphasizes recent results both from widely studied plants, such as Arabidopsis, maize and tomato, and emerging model systems that have significant economic importance or scientific novelty. The combined lecture plus lab format provides the students with a theoretical and practical introduction to current methods used in basic and applied plant biology. The instructors and a stellar group of invited speakers, acknowledged leaders in their fields, present up-to-the-moment research on a wide range of topics in plant research. The students are diverse, ranging from early-stage graduate students to tenure-track professors, with backgrounds in areas including mammalian biology, engineering, and physics. The informal, highly interactive course format allows students to learn from each other as well as from the invited speakers. In sum, the course provides an intensive three-week immersion into cross-disciplinary and cutting-edge approaches in plant biology, helping prepare the next generation of plant biologists to work at the interface of biological, computational and physical sciences. Broader Impacts. The broader impact of the course is the training of researchers in the most up-to-date computational and experimental resources and tools available for plant biology research. Students are chosen to include those who will most broadly disseminate information acquired in the course. Many of the students are likely to have educational and supervisory responsibilities in the near future; others are already professors or post-doctoral fellows who will immediately pass on what they have learned in the course. Many of the students who take the course go on to lead their own laboratories, with the course providing a foundation of knowledge and an important network of scientific contacts for these new lab heads. In fact, two of the current course instructors are course alumni. In recent years, female and male students were equally represented and several Hispanic students took part in the course. To further this trend, the course is advertised widely and specifically contacts institutional programs that facilitate recruiting and retention of underrepresented groups into the life sciences professoriate (e.g. NSF-supported AGEP programs and life sciences REU sites). The students come from a variety of backgrounds and are exposed to a wide range of bench and computational approaches during the course, increasing the chances that they will go on to carry out the interdisciplinary research that is vital for meeting today's global challenges.