Wednesday, May 21, 2008

ISAC Congress - Day 4

The Day 4 of the now International Society of Advancements on Cytometry saw the comeback of the plant sciences, first by the presence of Jaroslav Dolezel in the Parallel Session of "High Throughput, High Content Analysis" with the very interesting talk on "Development of Flow-Based Strategies for Genomics of Crop Plants". There were also some interesting talks on the Advances in Flow Cytometry Instrumentation, especially those related with Acoustically Focused Sample Streams.

The day continued with the presentation of the FlowJo Software, this time dedicated to the bare basics. It seems quite a powerful tool, but still I would like to test it myself to evaluate which features may be of particular interest for plant DNA flow cytometry purposes. Again, and as with the new instruments, I will soon dedicate a post to the new software that was presented in the Congress.


In the afternoon the first Workshop dedicated to plants took place "Plant Genome Structure and Gene Expression", and to our surprise up to 25 people were present, which clearly surpassed our best expectations. The Workshop was wonderfully conducted by Jaroslav Dolezel and David Galbraith, and we had nice talks made by Jan Suda, Johann Greilhuber and by both chairmans, which covered several topics on the application of FCM in plant sciences, from sample preparation and storage, standards and standardizations, chromosome sorting for studies of genome structure and protoplasts and nuclei sorting for studies of gene expression. I had the opportunity to present some slides on the effect of cytosol on the quantitative staining of DNA, which despite being well received, w perhaps too technical for what was intended. However in each talk, some interesting questions were made and in the end we were satisfied with the overall output and reception of the workshop.

The poster session was just afterwards and again it was a nice opportunity to present the FLOWer database to many different people. The reception was good and it was a very nice idea of the congress organizers to put all the poster of similar areas close to each other.

By the end of the day, I was almost "dead" but there were still some forces for some good dinner and fruitful discussions.

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