COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY 2019 WORKSHOP ON CEREAL GENOMICS

This proposal requests funds to support the participation of US graduate students in plant genetics and breeding to a training course in cereal genomics. A major aim of this course will be to enable students and post docs to take advantage of the emerging genomic data in the cereals, including complete genome sequences of all major cereal crops and model systems, and become trained in methods including Next Gen gene expression analysis, genome wide association analysis and genome editing. The proposal is targeted at the "Plant Breeding for Agricultural Production" priority area- since it will train students in genomics techniques that can enable plant breeding. Specific parts of the workshop are devoted to quantitative genetics, genome analysis, genome editing and phenomics, major areas of interest to current and future breeding efforts. It will also enable graduate student interaction with geneticists and other scientists, to promote careers in plant breeding, genetics and genomics. As a follow up to the highly successful Cereal Genomics workshops held in 2005, 2009 and 2016 at CSHL, we propose to organize this week-long workshop in the fall of 2019. With the recent releases of many cereal genome sequences, availability of huge GWAS and phenomics datasets and the emerging revolutionary genome editing technologies, the time is ripe to train young students and scientists in the tools and skills they need to exploit the emerging genome data across all cereal crops. The workshop is geared toward scientists from graduate, post-doctoral, faculty and industry levels, and will teach state of the art methodologies in cereal crop genomic analysis and data processing. Topics will include Cereal Anatomy and Diversity, Databases, Molecular Breeding, QTL/ GWAS, Phenomics Genome Sequencing and Structure, mRNAseq Analysis, Genome Editing and applications of Cereal Genomics. The format will be morning and evening lectures and afternoon hands on labs in informatics, using resources at CSHL and Cyverse. It is an ideal time for this new workshop, because of the recent advances in whole genome sequencing, genome editing and related fields. In addition, the general trend in funding geared towards crop plants means that many labs are trying to re-tool. This workshop will serve as a catalyst and important training forum to disseminate new techniques and promote use of data from other federally funded projects.