Hong Kong Co-Organizer: Jianhua Zhang

Drought and salinity cause serious global crop losses. Dramatic progress has been made over recent years at identifying individual biological mechanisms, genes and networks that are required for plant survival under abiotic stress. The emerging main challenges are to obtain an understanding of how these processes are coordinated within the plant, identification of many still unknown key players and genes and how different environmental stresses and their signaling pathways are integrated into an overall response. In addition to invited speakers, the organizers have left many open slots for talks to be selected from submitted abstracts and applications, further ensuring that late breaking developments and important fields will be widely represented.

This conference will bring together world class scientists from universities, research institutes, field stations and industries to present and discuss their latest research achievements. Due to the importance of the meeting subject for food safety the conference traditionally attracts participants from all continents, Asia, South and North America, Europe, Africa and Australia. The 2012 Gordon Research Conference on Salt and Water Stress in Plants will focus on new breakthroughs and advances in understanding stress reception, signal transduction, ion and water homeostasis, advanced molecular plant breeding, metabolism, systems level genomic and signaling network mechanisms, quantitative genetics, protein modifications, intracellular trafficking, control of gene expression as well as whole-plant physiology. The conference will further address the key question of how information gained in reference plant model systems, such as Arabidopsis, can be transferred to crop plants, and how fundamental knowledge can be translated into long-term strategies for improved stress tolerance in the field towards providing food and green energy production for the growing world population.