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A Meeting on "Genomes to Germplasm" will be held in INRA, Versailles, France from 28th February - 2nd March 2013.

Advances in nucleotide sequencing technologies have generated, or will shortly generate, reference genome sequences for all important crop and model plants; while large scale resequencing projects are generating enormous quantities of data about the distribution of polymorphism in natural and breeding populations. At the same time, automated phenotypic characterisation has also become a reality. Moving forward will require the ability to move between sequence data and accessions/germplasm, and associated phenotypes. The meeting will bring together about 30 research scientists, informaticians and crop breeders to address the biological and informatic challenges associated with our attempts to catalogue genomic variation and apply it to increase our understanding of plant biology and improve crop plants. Specific points of discussion will include (i) how natural variation is being sampled, and the likely future applications of this data (ii) informatics needs and solutions: what infrastructure and data standards are available, and what components are missing or underdeveloped, particularly in the context of globally distributed activities (iii) connections between germplasm resources and genomic databases and (iv) tools needed to practically apply these data for the purposes of plant breeding and crop development. The expected outcome of the meeting is a document intended to form a potential basis for future coordinated funding calls between the European Union and the United States.

More information about the agenda and organisational details will be posted here shortly. Attendance at this meeting is by invitation only. If you would like to suggest the participation of yourself or a colleague/collaborator to join the meeting, please contact Paul Kersey (pkersey at ebi dot ac dot uk).

This meeting is co-organised by the Plant Bioinformatics Working Group of the EC-US Task Force on Biotechnology Research, the transPLANT project, and the Gramene project.

Organising committee:

Paul Kersey, EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute
Klaus Mayer, Helmholtz Zentrum Munich
Hadi Quesneville, UGRI, INRA
Doreen Ware, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory/USDA-ARS

Image by Eric Pouhier (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons