SMPN 1 JKT

On July 21, RIKEN will host a science session entitled "Drought-tolerant plants: helping the world to cope with global warming" at EuroScience Open Forum 2008 (ESOF2008) held in Barcelona, Spain.

Environmental degradation and climate change are global problems. How can we use plant biotechnology to help? Molecular biological techniques can produce varieties of crops and trees that can tolerate drought. We need to understand plant responses to drought stress at the molecular level, since higher plants respond by various molecular and cellular processes.

This session, organized as one of the science sessions under the theme "Enhancing energy security, fighting global warming", will describe recent research on the functions of stress inducible genes, regulation of gene expression in response to drought stress, and identification of many drought inducible genes and their functions.

The speakers are the world's leading scientists in this field of research, namely, Dr. Dorothea Bartels from University of Bonn, Germany, Dr. Montserrat Pagés from Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain, and Dr. Kazuo Shinozaki from RIKEN (Institute of Physical and Chemical Research), Japan. A sociologist who has been concerned the public perception of genetic modified organisms, Dr. Massimiano Bucchi from University of Trento, Italy, will serve as a moderator.

For more information about the speakers, please click on this link http://www.riken.jp/engn/r-world/event/2008/esof/index.html

For more information about ESOF 2008, please click on this link http://www.esof2008.org/#PROGRAMME.html|main|PROGRAMME