Evolution of Plant Phenotypes. From Genomes to Traits

Connecting the genotype to phenotype is a grand biological challenge. Agriculture faces unprecedented challenges in the 21st century, necessitating a quantum leap forward in our ability to rapidly generate new plant varieties to meet rapidly changing agroecological conditions. This meeting will bring together leading-edge scientists working at the interface of plant evolution, crop domestication and breeding, molecular evolution, plant population genetics, plant physiology and bioinformatics to share new insights in plant evolutionary genomics and attempt to identify larger, unanswered questions and promising directions for future research.

The meeting, co-organized by B·Debate and the Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG), will pay particular emphasis on two of the most important insights into plant genome evolution that have emerged from the genomics era: 1) plants have evolutionary histories that include multiple rounds of whole genome doubling; and 2) the major contributor to plant genome dynamics and genome size evolution and differentiation has been the differential and lineage-specific proliferation (and deletion) of various transposable elements. These processes are now being shown to be associated with phenotypic diversification in plants, and thus represent an important link between genotype and phenotype. The link between these processes and crop improvement remains unexplored and presents an opportunity for future research directions.

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