During Jan.12th to 18th, 2018, Professor Zhang Tianzhen led his members, Hu Yan, Fang Lei and Chen Jiedan, to attend the “The Plant and Animal Genome XXVI Conference (PAG)” in Santiago, USA. It is designed to provide a forum on recent developments and future plans for plant and animal genome projects. Consisting of technical presentations, poster sessions, exhibits and workshops, the conference is an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas and applications on this internationally important project.
The PAG conference contains hundreds of topics. More than ten were carried out at the same time, providing a rich choice for participants. The issues were Wheat Genetics and genomics, International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium standards and protocols, polyploid research progress, bioinformatics, molecular breeding, gene splicing and annotation, functional genomics, genetics / genomics / bioinformatics teaching method, biological data management etc..
During the meeting, Professor Zhang Tianzhen served as chairman of the International Cotton Genome Initiative (ICGI) and summarized the latest developments of cotton research in the past two years. Meanwhile, Associate Professor Fang Lei carried out an oral presentation named as Domestication and Improvement of Cotton: From Tree Cotton to American Upland Cotton and to the World's Largest Fiber Crop at the ICGI conference. In addition, Professor Zhang Tianzhen also made an oral presentation The assembly of high quality genome of two tetraploid cotton in “Symposium on biological complex genome sequencing”, focusing on their important progress on cotton genome.
As the chief scientist of “the International Cotton Pan Genome Project”, Professor Zhang Tianzhen further host an academic discussion with David Fang from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), JohnYu from USDA, Professor Zhang Baohong from East Carolina University, Du Xiongming from the Cotton Research Institute and some technical personnel from Israel NRgene Company. The workgroup analyzed the current status of the cotton genome sequencing and the rationality and feasibility of the pan genome research in the next step.
Through the visit of this conference, they learned the latest research progress in the field of genomics, and understood the frontier development and potential application of genomics technology, which provided a reference for our scientific research in cotton genomics.
