Conference: 25th Conference of the International Plant Growth Substance Association (IPGSA2025) June 29-July 3, 2025 Fort Collins, Colorado

This award supports the travel of scientists, especially early-career scientists (students, postdocs, early career faculty), working at institutions in the United States to participate in the 25th Conference of the International Plant Growth Substances (IPGSA 2025), that will be held in Fort Collins, Colorado, 29 June through 3 July 2025. This conference brings together scientists studying a range of molecules that regulate plant growth.

The conference promotes interactions and scientific exchange between researchers with scientific backgrounds and interests that cross disciplines and scales. Such interactions will expose participants to the latest advances in the field as well as to an international research community. This exposure will play an especially significant role in advancing the professional development of early-career scientists helping to accelerate the training of the next generation of researchers.

This exchange of information is also critical to develop applications related to these molecules to increase crop yields, stress resistance, and improved post-harvest storage to improve food security. Novel information and ideas from this conference will be shared with other scientists via review and perspectives articles to broaden scientific research on plants.

Diffusible chemical signals play critical roles in the growth, development, and stress responses of plants. These signals are known collectively as plant growth regulators or substances. IPGSA 2025 will bring together established scientists, early-career faculty, students, postdoctoral fellows, and those new to the plant growth substances field to discuss the latest advances in the regulation of plants by these chemical signals.

The IPGSA meetings are unique because, unlike other conferences that focus on a single molecule or class of molecules (auxins, ethylene, etc.), the IPGSA conferences span all small molecules that regulate plant growth, thus promoting an integrated understanding of the regulation of plant growth, development, and responses to stresses. The science presented at IPGSA 2025 will involve integrating across scales, providing links between processes at the molecular and cellular levels to growth responses at the tissue and organismal levels.

This will include systems-wide studies that have facilitated the development of predictive models for growth-regulator signaling and for signal integration between different growth regulators. Talks will include interdisciplinary areas including the use of mathematical modeling to explore the topology of gene regulatory networks, the use of chemical biology to understand and control hormone signaling, studies of the plant microbiome that integrate microbiological and plant genetic approaches, and the use of a combination of biology, biophysics, and computational approaches to model hormone receptor structure.

Although the reference plant Arabidopsis thaliana is a focus of growth regulator research, many of the presentations will include studies conducted on non-model plant species.

This award is co-funded by the Developmental Systems Cluster (DSC) and the Physiological Mechanisms and Biomechanics (PMB) Program within the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems (IOS).

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.