Day two is in the books! Another full day including workshops, a major symposium, luncheons, conversation circles, the first two concurrent sessions, and the first poster session! Today was a day of choices. Unless you have perfected cloning, then you had to rely on Twitter to be in more than one place. As always, Twitter did not disappoint!
Early in the morning, the PUI section ran a career advice panel for grad students and postdocs interested in PUI careers. This was a fabulous event, PUI careers are very different than big schools and even within the PUI umbrella there is a great deal of variation so having a panel to help navigate this was perfect. Supporting students to get where they want to go is #ASPBForward to me.
Today’s major symposium was The Plant Cell editors symposium. The topic was cellular signaling. Cyril Zipfel opened with his receptor kinase work. Jenny Russinova showed us the structure and requirements for activation of brassinosteroid receptors. Julia Cuellar described how pollen tube cell walls are made. The session ended with Giles Oldroyd discussing nutritional regulation of plants ability to sense pathogens. Overall, an interesting session with plenty of Twitter coverage!
The afternoon spread everyone out across the convention center. There were demos and discussions in the Innovation Pavilion, the Women in Plant Biology Luncheon, and workshops covering publication tips, PlantingScience mentoring, and science policy advocacy.
The first concurrent session of the afternoon pitted my two favorites against each other… Education and Abiotic. Thankfully they were right next door so I could do some jumping. Even better there were awesome live-tweeters in each session! In addition to education and Abiotic, there was cell biology, bioenergy algae and bioproduct, and plant-biotic interaction. The second set of concurrent session decisions was genetics, light signaling, vegatative development, protein networks, and phenomics. Today was where Twitter really shines. Tweets from each session allowed me to practically be in every session! I could follow along and learn along with my colleagues while being across the convention center from them.
The day ended with the first poster session and the debut of the e-posters. What a fabulous idea these e-posters were! Multimedia embedded, zoom in for closer looks at data, while still having the interaction with the presenter. I’d give this idea a score of 12 out of 10!
See everyone tomorrow at day 3!