The meeting is organized over 4 days, with 3 talk sessions, involving 19 talks, a discussion in groups session, a poster session and long discussion times.
The three proposed talk sessions are the following:
● Talk session 1: Silene overview
This session will give an overview of Silene research directed to all participants, rather than focusing on latest research, explaining research questions, discussing benefits and limitations of the Silene system, as well as new ideas for research directions, for common resources to be developed and for contributions to make to these resources.
● Talk session 2: Recent advances
This session will be dedicated to the most recent studies carried out by early career researchers.
● Talk session 3: Getting inspiration from other plant model systems (invited speakers)
These talks on other plant model systems will explain which evolutionary aspects can be investigated, with which methodologies, how resources were developed, what problems had to be avoided, so that it can gives inspiration for further research on Silene.
Discussion in groups session and Discussion gallery: "What are the needs of the Silene community?”
Separate groups are formed to discuss a particular question. After that, everybody meets again and each group reports their results to all participants. This can be very useful to "activate" participation. Other, more detailed, follow-up issues (i.e., the different resources to develop) can be also discussed in specialised groups. Ideally this would lead to concrete plans for future actions. The following thematics are proposed:
Sex chromosomes
Silene mating systems: database and plant-pollinator interactions
Sequencing the Silene genome
Sharing resources on Silene: DNA, plant and seed material database, seed bank storage and sampling campaigns
Meet the speakers
Host-pathogens
Transcriptomics, epigenetics, cytogenetics
Evolution and adaptation
Phylogeography-related studies on African Silene
Speciation mechanisms
Grant and research project proposals
Chatrooms 1 to 5 for free discussion