The Frontiers and Techniques in Plant Science course provides an intensive overview of topics in genomics, genetics, physiology, biochemistry, development, and evolution and hands-on experiences in molecular, imaging, computational and high throughput approaches to understanding plant biology. It emphasizes recent results from model organisms including Arabidopsis and maize as well as a variety of other plants and provides an introduction to current methods used in basic and applied plant biology, both theoretically and practically.

The seminar series will include plant morphology and anatomy, development, evolution, light and mechanical biology, hormones, small RNAs and epigenetic inheritance, biotic and abiotic interactions, plant biochemistry, crop domestication, and applications addressing current agronomic problems. Speakers will provide expert overviews of their fields, followed by in-depth discussions of their own work.

The laboratory sessions will provide exposure to cutting edge experimental and computational techniques currently used in plant research. These include approaches for studying plant development, regulatory networks, transient gene expression, cell-type specific gene expression analysis, computational large-scale data analysis, applications of fluorescent proteins including live imaging, genome editing, and chromatin immunoprecipitation.