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The 2010 Maize Genetics Conference started with a call for maize geneticists to take on one of the greatest challenges of human history – feeding the world. Marianne Bänziger of CIMMYT presented the first plenary talk, titled Stress tolerant maize for the developing world – Challenges and prospects. Find the abstract of her talk at the end of this post.
Volker Brendel, professor of bioinformatics at Iowa State, spoke at the Maize Genetics Conference about the need for a better system of community annotation of the maize genome. The genome of the popular maize inbred line B73 is sequenced, but we don’t actually know what a lot of the code stands for. It’s going to take a lot of collaborative effort to discover and annotate (explain) the The 51st Maize Genetics Conference is just as overwhelming as I remembered from the the 49th (50 was in Washington DC and was too expensive for me to go). We have 480+ maize geneticists all in one resort in St. Charles, IL, presenting 244 posters, 4 plenary talks, 35 short talks, and innumerable conversations about maize. The topics range from perfecting the corn genome sequence to writing and using software to help us The NCCC-167 meeting is over, and I’m very glad to have had the opportunity to attend. The acronym stands for North Central Communications Committee, and 167 is the USDA-ARS project number. It turns out that there are hundreds of projects, some of which are designated for conferences and communications, such as this one. Apparently this particular conference used to be NCR-2 (North Central Region) but the rumor is that a Kansas corn breeder forgot Shawn Kaeppler is a researcher at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Center, a DOE Bioenergy Research Center, and the University of Wisconsin Department of Agronomy. Specific to this center is a lot of work on sustainability, including work on energy balance. You may be surprised, then, to hear that Shawn’s group is working on corn stover, but they have a strong rationale for doing so. Corn is closely related to the potential biofuel perennials miscanthus |
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