Korea-Germany Joint Symposium on Plant Biotechnology

I am pleasure to share the experience that I had in last two days in symposium.

The research data presented by German scientists and Korean Scientist was really different.

Main differences in the research areas of two countries can be stated as follows:

1. Germans have considered very big pictures and goals with expected application oriented results. On the other hand very few Korean researchers could give such kind of data.

2. The strong point of Korean research is that they focus on small points and make a good story to be published in high impact factor journals.

3. As compare to Korea, Germans have more high throughput techniques and they have many collaborations across globe to carry out specialized tasks.

4. Germans are very strong in Genomics and utilizing sequencing technologies while Koreans are very sharp to extract available data form database for their research.

Some of the talks that impressed me are summarize below:

1. Seasonal flowering in annual and perennial plants. By George Coupland (MPIZ)

2. Towards a blueprint for C4 photosynthesis derived from comparative transcriptomics of closely related C3 and C4 species. By Andreas Weber (University of Dusseldorf)

3. Molecular, biochemical and cellular studies of E3 ubiquitin ligases in response to drought stress in Arabidopsis. By Woo Teak  Kim (YONSEI University)

4. Barley- at the transition to genomics based crop improvement? By Nils Stein (IPK Gaterslenben)

5. Iron fortification of rice seeds through activation of Nicotinamine Synthase gene. By Gynheung An (Kyunghee University)