IAPB - Plant Biotech meeting

I'm just back from Hanmer Springs, where I attended the 19th New Zealand branch meeting for the International Association for Plant Biotechnology. Just loved it! There were some really great presentations on tissue culture, plant developments and new technologies in plant breeding, and Hanmer Springs is the most incredibly scenic place.

I mentally refreshed some of the techniques I used during my time as a Research Associate at AgResearch many years back - using plasmid vectors and restriction enzymes to clone DNA, and PCR to check whether all the pieces went together in the right order. Someone asked a very good question in one talk about whether concatemers were formed, and I knew what they were talking about! My AgResearch work used electroporation techniques to then get the plasmids into E. coli and Mycobacterium bovis (or bovine Tb). But plant transformation uses completely different techniques of course - neither of which I have tried yet. The biolistic guns methods look especially cool - perhaps science would appeal more to school kids if they got to see some of these guns shooting DNA-covered pellets into plants to transform them!  The 007 approach to modern day science!

Another presenter showed how oryzalin can double the somatic chromosome number in plants, from diploid 2n to the tetraploid in Sandersonia, which completely altered the plant's architecture. These were then crossed back with the 2n to obtain an infertile triploid which looked pretty marvelous. I wondered whether this might be a good option for increasing fruit size in my poroporo? Oryzalin is apparently found in the herbicide surfluran, which apparently cannot be bought over the shop counter. I might need to obtain my GrowSafe certificate in order to buy it and use it, so I'll investigate this a bit further.

Another brilliant presentation was the production of mature stigma-like structures from saffron in vitro (on agar plates basically), which release an exudate containing compounds associated with the saffron taste (picrocrocin), aroma (safranal) and colour (crocins) in very pure form.

Another talk discussed the potential for removing viruses, phytoplasmas and bacteria through cryotherapy (a two-step cooling process getting down to temps of -35 to -40 degrees Celcius), where ice nucleation crystals kill the pathogens. This could be useful! And another brilliant talk on micrografting in apples to reduce the breeding time - now that the apple genome has been sequenced and a huge deal of work has been done in mapping the genes and QTLs.

Very inspiring to get among plant scientists again and have a jolly good geek out, and of course enjoy the wonderful surroundings of Hanmer, the hot springs, sunshine and beautiful scenery!