The first sequenced genome of a plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, was published c.12 years ago (Arabidopsis Genome Initiative, 2000). Since that time, the genome sequences for more than twenty important crops have been completed and these are providing opportunities for both improving our understanding of the history of plant domestication and to accelerate crop improvement. Crop plant genomics is now firmly embedded in the breeding of many crops, improving the precision of breeding and enabling the assembly of multiple traits in new elite breeding lines and varieties. These advances will take plant breeding and trait analysis to a new level of accuracy and productivity that will be needed to meet the major challenges of increased food production in the coming years.
This conference seeks to bring together research in these areas and also focus on the application of markers for genetic improvement of our important crops through molecular marker assisted selection. The conference will focus on the basic and applied aspects of plant genomics, current developments in genome sequencing of our major crop plants in the UK and role of molecular breeding in crop improvement, including marker assisted trait introgression.
Themes for this conference will include:
• Genomics-assisted crop improvement.
• Genotyping technologies in plant breeding.
• Molecular marker-assisted breeding for resistance to pathogens, stress tolerance and nutritional quality
• Bioinformatics: importance and application to genomic approaches to crop improvement.
The conference will take place in the John Jerrold room at SportsPark, part of the University of East Anglia (near the top of the Campus map). The Genome Analysis Centre, venue for the tour during the morning of 5th December, is situated on the Norwich Research Park, adjacent to the University.
Please note that as presenters are not able to produce papers for the conference proceedings, we will now be providing Abstracts for this conference.
