ISAC Congress - Plant FCM Workshop Presentations

Despite that the Congress was already over almost one month ago, we are still summarizing some of the plant related events. Now, it is time to provide you with the presentations given in the plant FCM workshops (click on each image for download). The presentations may be used without copyright restrictions except for commercial or for profit use, provided there is some credit to the author and reference to this blog.

Workshop - Plant genome structure and gene expression - organized by David Galbraith and Jaroslav Dolezel











Presentations available by Jan Suda (Preparation and storage of plant samples for DNA flow cytometry), João Loureiro (The effect of cytosol on quantitative staining of nuclear DNA), Johann Greilhuber (Standardization and Standards), Jaroslav Dolezel (Chromosome analysis and sorting) and David Galbraith (Analysis of gene expression, including flow analysis and sorting of organelles and large cells)

Workshop - Plant evolutionary biology, biosystematics and ecology - organized by Brian Husband and Jan Suda







Presentations available by Jan Suda (The impact of FCM on plant Biosystematics and Taxonomy), Paul Kron (Flow Cytometry: Applications in the Study of Plant Reproductive Systems) and Brian Husband (Flow Cytometry and The Evolutionary Dynamics of Polyploids).

We hope that you enjoy the presentations.

Some other ISAC posters related with plant flow cytometry

After having talked with some of the participants related with plant flow cytometry, some of them agreed in sending me a jpg version of their posters. Please click on each image for the full size of the poster. As soon as I receive more posters, I will update this post.

Contributors:
Tomas Urfus - Department of Botany, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.
Sara V. Petersson - Umea Plant Science Center, Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umea, Sweden.
Jingly Zhang - HortResearch, New Zealand.

Many thanks to all the contributors.

ISAC Congress - The plant sciences team

For prosperity the picture of the organizing team of the plant sciences sections of the ISAC Congress.

(from left to right: Jaroslav Dolezel, João Loureiro, David Galbraith, Jan Suda, Johann Greilhuber, Brian Husband and Paul Kron)

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.

ISAC Congress - Day 3

The ISAC continues and the Day 3 was for me mostly dedicated to the commercial exhibitors. The Exhibit Hall presents many interesting offers and we can see the rise of smaller companies that are providing very interesting and competitive instruments. From what concerns the plant flow cytometry world, where the Partec flow cytometers rule, tough competition may start to appear. Partec itself presented their latest offers in the lunch commercial tutorial, but later on, in a different post, I will make a more dedicate overview of which (new) instruments were presented in the congress that might be of interest to plant flow cytometrists. The Congress itself was not very attractive, i.e., after the extraordinary Sunday it came the more so... so Monday...

Some more ISAC photos

The Budapest Sportsarena, home of the ISAC Congress for 5 days:



The exhibit hall:


The main auditorium:

ISAC Congress - Day 2

The second day of the ISAC congress may well be remembered as one of the most interesting, despite three days are still to come.

The day couldn't have started better with the interesting parallel session on the "Advances in Flow Cytometry Instrumentation I" where I would like to highlight the innovative approach directed to increase the measurement rates of current flow cytometers, laser rastering. The session was pretty full has it can be easily perceived from the picture.

Further highlights from Sunday include the impact that cytometry has been having in Marine Microbiology, as impressively presented by Ger van der Engh, and the High-Throughput microscopy analysis of the cytoskeleton, showed by Ronald Vale.

The commercial tutorial given by Tree Star, Inc. on the FlowJo software and on what advanced features will be present in the upcoming versions of the software was also quite interesting.

However, the cherry on top of the cake (I hope that this expression also makes some sense in English) was Howard Shapiro talk by the end of the day. As usual, he guided us through the History of Cytometry with his nice, sometimes bitter, sense of humour that pleased all the audience. For the end, a new version of his famous poem, now renamed as "There Is A Business Like Flow Business", was presented, wonderfully accompanied by background music and his still nice voice.

Our poster on the FLOWer database presented in ISAC Congress 2008

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.