{"id":62218,"date":"2019-11-21T16:05:54","date_gmt":"2019-11-21T21:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=62218"},"modified":"2019-11-21T16:19:57","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T21:19:57","slug":"green-thumbs-to-unite-at-brock-this-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2019\/11\/green-thumbs-to-unite-at-brock-this-weekend\/","title":{"rendered":"Green thumbs to unite at Brock this weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This year&#8217;s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/cspb-scbv.ca\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Eastern Regional Meeting<\/a>\u00a0for the Canadian Society of Plant Biologists (CSPB) is being hosted at Brock University Friday, Nov. 22 to Saturday, Nov. 23.<\/p>\n<p>CSPB was founded in 1958, originally known as the Canadian Society of\u00a0Plant Physiologists, and now has more than 400 members, composing the largest Canadian organization of plant scientists.<\/p>\n<p>Biological Sciences Professor Vincenzo De Luca from the Faculty of Mathematics and Science is a member and organizing committee chair for this year\u2019s CSPB meeting.\u00a0Since its inception, CSPB has entertained annual nationwide and international conferences, and has become highly focused on training graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the art of timely and clear presentation and description of research results.<\/p>\n<p>Two young emerging scientists,\u00a0Isabel Desgagn\u00e9-Penix from the Universit\u00e9 du Qu\u00e9bec \u00e0 Trois Rivi\u00e8res, and David Smith from Western University,\u00a0will give\u00a0symposium talks on their research and on new developments in the field.<\/p>\n<p>Desgagn\u00e9-Penix\u00a0will present \u201cCracking the code of Amaryllidaceae alkaloid biosynthesis.&#8221; Her research uses new\u00a0technologies to highlight the potential for discovery of genes involved in Alzheimer\u2019s disease, and she has earned a reputation for seeking out new methods of synthesizing alkaloids that may better treat the disease.<\/p>\n<p>Smith will present\u00a0\u201cStranger things: the organelle genome edition.&#8221; His\u00a0plenary brings to light the strange functions of genomes that break the rules.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI have devoted my career as a researcher to exploring organelle genomes, many of which seem to show no bounds in their propensity for peculiar and noncanonical characteristics,&#8221; said Smith.<\/p>\n<p>The conference will also see oral and poster competitions for graduate students. While the best oral\/poster presentations are highly competitive, they take place in a friendly and cordial atmosphere to discuss all aspects of plant biology.<\/p>\n<p>Brock has traditionally participated in holding Eastern Regional Meetings of the CSPB. Since Professor De Luca\u2019s arrival in the Department of Biological Sciences in 2001, the University has hosted the meeting in 2003, 2010 and now 2019. This year participants are coming come from several Universities (Carleton, Guelph, McMaster, Queens, Wilfred Laurier, Waterloo, Western and Toronto in addition to Brock), as well as various government research institutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This year&#8217;s\u00a0Eastern Regional Meeting\u00a0for the Canadian Society of Plant Biologists (CSPB) is being hosted at Brock University Friday, Nov. 22 to Saturday, Nov. 23.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[54,41],"tags":[49,467,348,8464],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62218"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62218"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62274,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62218\/revisions\/62274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}