Short resume of the Xth Symposium of the International Organization of Plant Biosystematics

Before updating all the usual sections of the blog, I want to leave you a very short overview of the Xth Symposium of the International Organization of Plant Biosystematics. Overall, the Symposium was a success both in organization and scientific value. The venue was held on the beautiful High Tatras which was another positive aspect.

Flow cytometry speaking it was nice to see that there are more and more researchers using this technique to help solving byosystematic and taxonomy problems. The number of posters where flow cytometry was used exceeded the 20 and several talks also referred its usefulness and potential for large scale ploidy level and genome size analyses. The only regret was the unexpected cancelling of D. Soltis talk due to passport issuing problems. Maybe next time...

Finally, Jan Suda wonderfully and enthusiastically presented a talk addressing all the potentialities that the technique has in the field of Biosystematics, which was a sure highlight of the congress's second day.

I leave you some other pictures from the Tatras journey:

ISAC Congress - Day 1

Today, the XXIV International Congress of ISAC started in the beautiful city of Budapest. As promoted in previous posts of the blog, right in early morning the first activity related to plant flow cytometry, the tutorial dedicated to the estimation of genome size in plants, took place. Due to the extra costs of such an activity together with the already high costs of the Congress, only two participants attended to the tutorial. So, it was one of those occasions where the tutors outnumbered the students/participants... what a luxury! More seriously, we were sorry that there were not more people interested in our area, but I must also say that our expectations were not so high, as most of the participants are from the biomedical field. In case you are interested in knowing what you've missed, you can download the presentation in pdf format at: http://rapidshare.com/files/115567579/Tutorial__final_.pdf.html

The poster that we bring to the congress is already mounted in its panel just near the entrance of the main room of the Arena, where the chaos still rules with all the commercial exhibitors preparing their booth's with their top products.

The Congress officially started in the afternoon with the Frontiers talks dedicated to some technological advances in cytometry and with the Keynote Lecture given by Dr. Lansing Taylor on the Evolution of Image Cytometry.

Now, it is time for the Opening Reception, a nice opportunity to meet other researchers while snacking and drinking some "traditional" Hungarian starters.

New year, new life

Dear colleagues,

This new year brought me an almost new life, as I am since last week connected with the Department of Botany of the Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic) and with the Laboratory of Flow Cytometry of the Institute of Botany in Pruhonice, where I will continue my studies (Post-Doc). I left many nice friends and colleagues in the Department of Biology of the University of Aveiro (Portugal) but it was time to move on, and the Czech Republic, especially the group of Jan Suda, is the best place to progress with my scientific career.

I am really excited with this new phase, but I am still adapting to the nice Czech culture, especially to its difficult language and cold temperatures, and to different flow cytometers.

I will try to keep the blog updated, and new ideas for it are welcome. Please post them in the comments to this post.

The best wishes for 2008.

João Loureiro

New paper on Nature Protocols

The Central Europe plant flow cytometry triangle team, i.e., Jaroslav Dolezel (Olomouc), Johann Greilhuber (Vienna) and Jan Suda (Prague), has just published another very interesting manuscript on the estimation of nuclear DNA content in plants using cytometry. This review and step-by-step protocol has just been published in Nature Protocols the online resource for protocols of the Nature Publishing Group.

The article is very carefully written and presents step-by-step protocols for the analysis of nuclear DNA content in plant tissues, with the underlining of the procedure's critical steps. A very useful troubleshooting table is also provided, with the possible reasons and solutions for the most common problems that may appear upon analysis of plant tissues using flow cytometry. Therefore the article is utterly recommended not only for beginners but also for more experienced users of the area of plant FCM.

Below follows the abstract and the link to the online version of the manuscript.

Abstract:
Flow cytometry (FCM) using DNA-selective fluorochromes is now the prevailing method for the measurement of nuclear DNA content in plants. Ease of sample preparation and high sample throughput make it generally better suited than other methods such as Feulgen densitometry to estimate genome size, level of generative polyploidy, nuclear replication state and endopolyploidy (polysomaty). Here we present four protocols for sample preparation (suspensions of intact cell nuclei) and describe the analysis of nuclear DNA amounts using FCM. We consider the chemicals and equipment necessary, the measurement process, data analysis, and describe the most frequent problems encountered with plant material such as the interference of secondary metabolites. The purpose and requirement of internal and external standardization are discussed. The importance of using a correct terminology for DNA amounts and genome size is underlined, and its basic principles are explained.

Author for correspondence: Jaroslav Dolezel; e-mail: dolezel@ueb.cas.cz

Online version