Meeting report : Innovation in biology for the next generation!

Abstract

The 66 Annual Meeting of the Korean Association of Biological Sciences was held August 18-19 at Hallym University, Chuncheon, Korea. The theme of the meeting this year was “Innovation in Biology for the Next Generation.” Two plenary lectures by Prof. J. Mark Cock (National Center for Scientific Research, University of Paris) and Prof. Kyungjin Kim (Seoul National University, Korea) were followed by symposia, including over 540 posters, sponsored by the participating societies: the Korean Society of Integrative Biology, the Korean Society of Limnology, the Ecological Society of Korea, the Korean Society of Biological Education, the Korean Society of Systematic Zoology, and the Genetics Society of Korea (GSK). Prof. Cock’s plenary lecture focused on genome evolution in the brown algae. His group recently published the whole genome sequence of the filamentous brown alga Ectocarpus siliculosus (Cock et al., 2010). He discussed several interesting genomic features of the Ectocarpus genome including the presence of an extended set of light-harvesting and pigment biosynthesis genes and new metabolic processes. One particularly interesting result from the Ectocarpus genome is that the membrane-localized receptor kinase gene families have evolved independently in brown algae, plants and animals, suggesting a strong link between the emergence of the kinase gene families and the evolution of multicellularity in each lineage. While the gametophytic life cycle in higher organisms is dependent on the sporophytic life cycle, in algae the two life cycles are independent. The genes expressed during the transition from sporophytic to gametophyte cycles in brown algae were different from those expressed during that transition in higher eukaryotes. Prof. Cock also presented evidence that the protein OUROBOROS is a master regulator of the gametophyte to sporophyte life cycle transition in Ectocarpus (Coelho et al.