Workshops

Delfi Dorussen has been awarded the IWGSC-Feuillet Early Career Award and will receive her award at the Plant & Animal Genome Conference (PAG) in San Diego, California (USA) in January 2025. Delfi also received a travel stipend to travel to the PAG conference to present a talk during the IWGSC main workshop on Saturday 11 January 2025.

The IWGSC has led the effort to develop a high quality, reference sequence of the large, complex (hexaploid), bread wheat genome: IWGSC RefSeq v1.0 and annotation v1.1 as well as IWGSC RefSeq v2.1 and accompanying annotation. The IWGSC began a new wheat diversity project to bring to platinum quality the reference sequence and 12 landraces that reflect the breadth of wheat diversity. In the IWGSC workshop this year, there will be a key presentation on the genomics of the AE Watkins wheat landrace collection, several talks on advances in functional genomics, as well as a presentation on a snRNA-SEQ atlas. As usual, the workshop also includes the presentation of the IWGSC-Feuillet Early Career Award, Delfi Dorussen,on whether transcriptional compensation facilitates functional redundancy in wheat. This award is given to a young scientist nominated by anyone in the wheat community and selected by the IWGSC leadership in recognition of outstanding achievement.

The wheat reference genome sequence (IWGSC RefSeq v1.0 & v2.1) has provided a foundation that has propelled recent advances in research and improvement of wheat. For the Structural and Functional Genomics Workshop, continued advances in research and understanding will require new experimental and computational approaches to structurally identify and assign function to genes (both coding and non-coding) as well as regulatory elements and epigenetic states. Presentations in this workshop will include the advances in structural and functional genomics as well as a presentation on assembling complex genomes.

The following scientist presented their research at the IWGSC Workshops at PAG32