Physiological Genomics Workshop in St. Louis, MO, April 2020: Finding and Mending the Knowledge Gaps between Plant Physiology and Plant Functional Genetics/Genomics

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A two-day workshop will be convened in St. Louis Missouri in April 2020 to discuss ways to address emerging scientific challenges at the intersection of plant physiology and genetics/genomics. Current advances in technology have enabled novel approaches to measure properties of plants and to sequence thousands of plant samples. These techniques are complex and communities of researchers have grown around them. To truly make sense of the complicated interactions that drive plant growth, scientists must be able to work across the disciplines. The facilitated workshop will be devoted to identifying successful strategies to bring research communities together, and will address challenges to scientific progress and strategies to overcome barriers to research progress. The workshop will include scholars from diverse career stages, institutional types, geographical locations, gender, and ethnic backgrounds and will result in a white paper summarizing discussions and conclusions.Understanding how plants interact with the environment requires understanding how information moves from the genome to cellular phenotypes to tissue level responses that determine organismal responses and ecosystem outcomes. Historically, these questions have been addressed by separate fields, such as genomics/genetics and physiology. In order to form links between fields, it is important to understand what are the cultural, institutional and human obstacles that researchers trying to bridge these gaps are encountering. To address some of these gaps, a workshop will be convened of scientists working across the plant physiology and genetics/genomics problem space to (1) identify successful strategies that use plant physiology, genetics and genomics to understand how plants respond to the environment; (2) identify scientific and technology gaps that could be bridged by interdisciplinary approaches; (3) identify communication and collaboration challenges to overcome; and (4) propose solutions and directions to advance the interdisciplinary field. In order to disseminate these results, a whitepaper will be written to summarize the findings and published in a plant society journal. The development and dissemination of the whitepaper is anticipated to support cross-disciplinary dialogue that advance the development of solutions. The workshop will include scholars from diverse career stages, institutional types, geographical locations, gender, and ethnic backgrounds.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.