Meeting: International Conference on Duckweed Research at Rutgers University on August 21-24, 2013

追求低碳足迹的生物质和可再生燃料的可持续生产已成为全球优先事项。创建和采用生态和经济上可持续的新生物质和燃料生产平台至关重要，但也构成了巨大的挑战。 浮萍是水生植物的一个家族，作为燃料和饲料生产的原料具有很大的潜力。 使浮萍成为废物转化为生物质的理想选择的主要特征是它们的快速生长速度和能够实现简单收获策略的生长特性。因此，浮萍为创造可持续的生物质生产解决方案提供了一个有前途的平台，这种解决方案可以与回收不同来源的废水相结合。形成一个协调良好的跨学科研究人员和商业开发人员社区将是建立成功的浮萍研究团队以及产品开发以造福整个社会的关键一步。在这个项目中，研究人员将组织一次国际会议，重点是整合研究人员和商业利益相关者，他们正在建立必要的资源来推进浮萍平台。 从分子生物学、生态学、废水治理到利用浮萍生产饲料和燃料，本次会议将为数据共享以及思想和技术资源的交叉施肥提供一个亲密的论坛。 一个重要的目标将是为这一领域设立一个国际指导委员会，以促进对浮萍研究人员、学生和企业家的教育、研究和培训。 该项目的广泛影响预计将激励学术和商业部门的浮萍社区实现这种新型微型作物的巨大潜力，以创造一个新的产业，也将是生态无害的。

The quest for sustainable production of biomass and renewable fuels that have low carbon footprints has become a global priority. Creating and adopting new biomass and fuel production platforms that are ecologically and economically sustainable will be essential, but pose a formidable challenge. Duckweed is a family of aquatic plants that holds great potential as a feedstock for fuel and feed production. The chief characteristics that make duckweed ideal for waste-to-biomass conversion are their rapid growth rate and their growth characteristics that enable simple harvest strategies. Duckweed thus provides a promising platform for creating sustainable solutions to biomass production that can be coupled to reclamation of wastewater from different sources. The formation of a well-coordinated, interdisciplinary community of researchers and commercial developers will be a key step toward building successful teams for duckweed research, as well as product development to benefit society-at-large. In this project, the investigators will organize an international conference that focuses1 on integrating researchers and commercial stakeholders that are establishing the essential resources to advance the duckweed platform. From diverse areas of molecular biology, ecology, wastewater remediation, to feed and fuel production using duckweed, this conference will provide an intimate forum for data sharing as well as the cross-fertilization of ideas and technical resources. An important objective will be the creation of an International Steering Committee for this field in order to promote education, research and training of duckweed researchers, students and entrepreneurs. The broader impact of this project is expected to galvanize the duckweed community in both the academic and commercial sectors for realizing the tremendous potential of this novel micro-crop to create a new industry that will also be ecologically sound.