Objectives

​This workshop brought together a community of interdisciplinary scientists to brainstorm broad directions the Plant Cell Atlas (PCA) Initiative should take, challenges it might face, and ways to prepare for those challenges. The workshop featured invited talks and breakout sessions focused on technical challenges, community wants and needs, and the conceptual goals of the PCA.
Overall Goals:
  1. Build a community that shares the vision of this initiative and works collaboratively to develop the PCA.
  2. Solicit input from the community about critical questions such as:
    1. What information gaps are most urgent?
    2. What levels of data quality and validation will optimize the utility of this resource?
    3. What are the benefits of this initiative to science and society?
  3. Discuss data standards, data sharing policies, and efforts to build the PCA into a scientific resource.
  4. Identify and discuss the challenges and bottlenecks that this project will face.​
  5. Develop ideas and identify emerging tools and experimental methodologies that will contribute to a high-resolution, high-throughput characterization of localization, interaction, and functional attributes of cellular proteins.
  6. Develop white papers and a set of recommendations.

You can find recordings of the talks and Q&A sessions for each day on the Plant Cell Atlas YouTube Channel. Links to individual talks and Q&A sessions can be found in the agenda.

Workshop Organizers and Speakers

Agenda

Session 1:    Friday, May 15, 2020
8:00 AM - 8:10 AM 
Introduction
8:10 AM - 8:30 AM
Session 1 Talks:  Vision for Plant Cell Atlas - Biological questions that will be enabled
​Dominique Bergmann  (Stanford University)
     Plant development and cell fate determination
bergmann_pca_session_i_development.pdf
File Size: 21648 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File
Uta Paszkowski (University of Cambridge)
     Plant-microbe interactions
Liwen Jiang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
     Organelle biogenesis
Martin Jonikas  (Princeton University)
​     Organelle and plant engineering
8:30 AM - 8:45 AM 
Talks Q&A Session​
8:45 AM - 9:30 AM
Breakout Session 1: Scientific challenges
  1. What are the biggest open questions in plant cellular organization and function, development, physiology, and metabolism today?
  2. ​How would a comprehensive Plant Cell Atlas of protein function, molecular locations, dynamics and interactions help address these questions?
  3. What types of data should be included in a comprehensive Plant Cell Atlas?
  4. How should efforts be prioritized in terms of species, cell and data types?
  5. What new questions will we be asking if we had a comprehensive Plant Cell Atlas?
9:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Rejoin and Report-out
Session 2:    Friday, May 22, 2020
8:00 AM - 8:10 AM
Introduction
8:10 AM - 8:30 AM
Session 2 Talks:  Tools and Techniques for PCA
Alexander Jones  (Sainsbury Laboratory )
     Emerging live imaging techniques & tools
​Tess Branon (University of California, Berkeley)
     Emerging proteomics techniques & tools
Markita Landry (University of California, Berkeley)​     
​     Emerging plant transformation techniques & tools
Becky Bart  (Danforth Plant Science Center)
     Emerging homologous recombination techniques & tools​​
8:30 AM - 8:45 AM 
Talks Q&A Session
8:45 AM - 9:30 AM
Breakout Session 2: Technology
  1. What are the key existing technologies and tools needed to enable a comprehensive Plant Cell Atlas? 
  2. ​What technologies on the horizon (or beyond) should be developed?
  3. ​What are the biggest technical challenges/bottlenecks and how might they be overcome?
9:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Rejoin and Report-out
Session 3:  Tuesday, June 2, 2020
8:00 AM - 8:10 AM
Introduction
8:10 AM - 8:30 AM
Session 3 Talks:  Broader Impacts, Infrastructure, and Community Building
Nicholas Provart  (University of Toronto)
     Visualizing the PCA
George Bassel  (University of Warwick)
     Tissue modeling
Amy Marshall-Colón  (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
     Crop engineering
Drew Endy  (Stanford University)
     Synthetic biology and bio-based economy
8:30 AM - 8:45 AM 
Talks Q&A Session
8:45​ AM - 9:30 AM
Breakout Session 3: Broader Impacts + Community Building
  1. Who should be stakeholders/members of the PCA community?​
  2. What should be the main purpose and goal of the PCA?
  3. ​How will PCA impact plant science and society?
9:30 AM - 9:55 AM
Rejoin and Report-out
9:55 AM - 10:00 AM
Closing Remarks by Eric D. Isaacs and Sue Rhee
STANFORD LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
“The Plant Cell Atlas operates predominantly out of the Carnegie Institution for Science's Plant Biology Department located at Stanford University. Stanford sits on the ancestral land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone people. Consistent with our values of community and inclusion, we have a responsibility to acknowledge, honor, and make visible the University’s relationship to Native peoples.”
Carnegie Institution for Science
Department of Plant Biology
260 Panama St.
​Stanford, CA 94305
National Science Foundation logo. A blue globe with
Grant #'s: 1916797 & 2052590