Workshop

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:

Build a community that shares the vision of this initiative and works collaboratively to develop the PCA.
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?
Discuss data standards, data sharing policies, and efforts to build the PCA into a scientific resource.
Identify and discuss the challenges and bottlenecks that this project will face.
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.
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.

Epidermal plasma membrane in green and nuclei (H2B-TFP) in blue, together with chlorophyll autofluorescence in red below in the mesophyll. Photo credit: Kate Harline (Roeder Lab)

Pin1-YFP (yellow) and DR5::RFP (red) in the maize shoot apex. Photo credit: Leiboff Lab

Depth coded image of the actin cytoskeleton in root hairs from the model legume Medicago truncatula. Photo credit: Elison Blancaflor

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
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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

What are the biggest open questions in plant cellular organization and function, development, physiology, and metabolism today?
How would a comprehensive Plant Cell Atlas of protein function, molecular locations, dynamics and interactions help address these questions?
What types of data should be included in a comprehensive Plant Cell Atlas?
How should efforts be prioritized in terms of species, cell and data types?
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

What are the key existing technologies and tools needed to enable a comprehensive Plant Cell Atlas?
What technologies on the horizon (or beyond) should be developed?
What are the biggest technical challenges/bottlenecks and how might they be overcome?