Annual BioImprove meeting

Our second annual meeting was held here in Umeå. The theme for the meeting was “Meeting the media”. The day was started by presentations of two journalists, Karin Wikman and Hans Fällman, who  instructed and told about their experiences on how to contact media and write press releases as a scientist. We also heard some shorter presentations from students and PIs within the BioImprove project. The graduate student Prashant Pawar described some exciting results about modifications in the Populus wood chemistry that resulted in increases in saccharification potential both in Arabidopsis and Populus. Additional chemically modified Populus trees and results about their saccharification potential were presented by the graduate student Venkata Soudham. The graduate student Amir described some interesting novel approaches to study sugar allocation in Populus trees. Assistant professor Torgeir Hvidsten told about the progress of his project to identify regulatory networks within metabolomic, proteomic and RNA sequencing data of the transgenic BioImprove Populus trees using bioinformatics tools. Last, professor Stefan Jansson from the department of plant physiology at UPSC talked about his experiences around the debate article published in Dagens Nyheter. The day was finished with a wonderful dinner in a ghostly atmosphere of Baggböle Herrgård.