Plant Ontology and Gramene's Gene Annotation Workshop
Saturday July 31, 8:00 am - 12:00 pm
Travel award to participants from the USA
Application Deadline: NOW CLOSED (It was July 15, 2010).
Applicants: Everyone working on plant biology research is welcome to apply. However, applications from US citizens who are women, minorities, and/or persons with disabilities are especially encouraged. Researchers working in the institutions recognized as serving the minorities and underrepresented are also encouraged.
Workshop information: As more and more plant species are getting sequenced and large-scale phenotyping screens are being setup, we see a diversity of annotation types and descriptors being used for these experiments. Having a new genome and large datasets are an excellent way forward to find novel ways to learn about plant development and behavior. However, in doing so we also realize that many of the descriptors are either very species specific and/or do not meet the community standards of functional characterization by use of various ontologies such as Gene Ontology and Plant Ontologies. In addition to that not, every plant community has sufficient personnel, computational and monetary resources to manage the annotation of its genome. Therefore, these communities depend heavily on the high-quality annotations of the of model and reference plants. Henceforth, in order to create gold-standard datasets that can be used in annotations, we want to train the current and future plant biologists with emphasis on young investigators, students, postdocs and especially those representing the minority and underrepresented institutions to help us foster good practices and build a community of curators that will undertake the task of creating a gold-standard dataset for plant biologists.
To facilitate collaborative international research in the area of plant biology, funds have been granted from the NSF Plant Genome Program to the Plant Ontology and the Gramene projects on comparative plant genomics, to support the participation of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty from the USA to attend the Plant Ontology and Gramene's Gene Annotation Workshop to be held on 31st July, 2010 at the Plant Biology 2010 to be held in Montréal, Canada. Workshop speakers will feature scientists from the Plant Genome Biology community and will provide an excellent opportunity for young scientists to learn about the gene annotation procedures by participating in the hands on working session.
Applicants must be US residents affiliated with a US institution. The support provided will be in the form of partial reimbursement of conference registration fees. Applicants should submit their application for the travel award by filling the online form. The abstract section in the application form must include a brief statement on how their attendance at the workshop will enhance your research and facilitate the gene annotation. The deadline for applications is July 15, 2010. Applications from US citizens who are women, minorities, and persons with disabilities are especially encouraged.
If you are not yet registered for this workshop, please do so by sending an email to info@aspb.org. In order to participate in the workshop, you must register for the Plant Biology 2010 meeting.
Travel awards were announced today July 23rd, 2010 and the awardees are:.
Andreas Madlung -- University of Puget Sound
Arijit Mukherjee -- University of Wisconsin, Madison
Dazhong Zhao -- University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Fuyu Xu -- University of Maine
Jeonghwa Lee -- University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Jian Zhao -- The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation
Lei Zhu -- University of California, Riverside
Michelle Facette -- University of California, San Diego
Peter Lundquist -- Cornell University
Manoj Kumar -- University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Surinder Chopra -- Pennsylvania State University
Tanya Falbel -- University of Wisconsin - Madison
Veronica Justen -- University of Wisconsin-River Falls
Songqing Ye -- University of Minnesota
Award notification were sent to the awardees via email.