Plant DNA repair and recombination on the French Mediterranean

Abstract

This EMBO Workshop on Plant DNA Repair & Recombination took place between 31 May and 3 June 2007, in Presqu'ile de Giens, France, and was organized by B. Hohn, A. Levy, H. Puchta, D. Shippen, C. Well and C. White. ![][1] Two factors motivate research in plant DNA repair and recombination today: the unique tools that plants offer for understanding fundamental biological processes, and the promise that a deeper understanding of these processes will facilitate improved technologies for breeding and engineering crops for food, fuel and medicines (Tzfira & White, 2005). With these thoughts in mind, scientists assembled at the Presqu'ile de Giens in the south of France from 31 May to 3 June 2007 for an EMBO Workshop on Plant DNA Repair & Recombination to share their latest results. Almost 10 years have passed since the previous EMBO Workshop on the topic—organized in 1998 in the Netherlands—so expectations were high. Owing to space limitations, this report cannot be comprehensive and will, instead, reflect meeting highlights by using feedback from the session chairs. The processes of DNA repair and recombination have been studied for many years using various organisms including bacteria and yeast, and also mammalian cells and plants. This has revealed the subtleties of the molecular mechanisms underlying these processes and has shown on the one hand clear conservation of these processes in evolution, and on the other clear differences in their regulation among the different organisms. Such differences make harnessing the recombination process for precise genetic engineering easily accomplished in yeasts, but (currently) tedious in mammalian and plant cells. The power of plant genetics, especially with the aid of the model organisms Arabidopsis thaliana and Oryza sativa , is proving to be instrumental in the identification of factors that mediate and regulate recombination. Importantly, it has been shown that … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif