The 51st Maize Genetics Conference is just as overwhelming as I remembered from the the 49th (50 was in Washington DC and was too expensive for me to go). We have 480+ maize geneticists all in one resort in St. Charles, IL, presenting 244 posters, 4 plenary talks, 35 short talks, and innumerable conversations about maize. The topics range from perfecting the corn genome sequence to writing and using software to help us navigate it to the intricate details of transposons and centromeres… and a little bit of applied work as well. There’s no way one person could convey all of the information presented here, but I hope I can share some of the tidbits that were particularly interesting to me in my next few posts. You can find the entire 201 page program on the MaizeGDB website, which includes abstracts of all of the posters and talks. Many people will upload their talks and posters to the website, I’ll let you know when they go up.
