Workshops: Plant Tissue Culture Medium and Best Practices for Successful In Vitro Tissue Culture Systems for Crop Genome Engineering

The Society for In Vitro Biology (SIVB) will hold four workshops and two cross-sectional panel discussions at its 2024 and 2025 annual meetings designed to educate participants on the topics of plant tissue culture and genetic engineering. The workshops will target researchers including faculty, students, post-docs, and industry personnel involved in utilizing plant tissue culture and gene insertion techniques for the development of improved crop cultivars. Programs will contain both in-person and virtual content. Following the conferences, presentations and other generated materials will be made available to interested groups who wish to use them for research and educational purposes in classroom teaching or laboratory sessions. Currently there is a need for experts in the field of plant tissue culture and transformation. Many have spent decades of research and continually seek opportunities to share and disseminate knowledge, good practices and learnings to the emerging group of scientists, especially those in underserved or minority communities who may not have ready access to this information. These workshops serve as a perfect platform and aim to target new and young faculty and industry personnel involved in tissue culture and genetic engineering/genome editing research along with students and community college educators who wish to introduce these topics in the classroom. It is the expectation that organizers will generate sets of informational material that will enable the long-term dissemination of this crucial knowledge. The workshops will impact a diverse community of researchers who are involved in plant tissue culture and genetic engineering/genome editing research activities. It will also ensure that the expertise generated in the area of in vitro plant tissue culture during the 20th century will be successfully passed on to the incoming generations of new researchers and help create a workforce for advancing genome engineering and crop improvement technologies. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.