Download a copy of the meeting program by clicking the icon to the right. 
The meeting was held
on March 6 - 8, 2004 in Lafayette,
LA.
Charyl Chlan of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette will be the local coordinator.
Field Trip
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At
this meeting we had a
field trip to Lake Martin, Louisiana which is about
a 20 minute drive from the Hotel Acadiana. It
is world famous as one of the largest nesting
areas for wading birds in the US and the Audubon
Society has rated Lake Martin as one of the top
ten bird watching spots in the country. Even
though birding is best early in the morning, we
saw some
of the egrets (white, snowy or cattle) little
blue herons, night herons, ibis and possibly
even roseate spoonbills that visit Lake Martin. If
you come back sometime in the summer, you can
see Barred and Great Horned Owls, Downy, Hairy,
Pileated and Red-Bellied Woodpeckers, and several
types of warblers. |
As
plant biologists we appreciated Lake Martin's
Cypress and Tupelo trees as well s its old-growth
live oak ridges. It is one of the
best sections of bottomland hardwood forest that
remain in the lower Mississippi valley. If
you would like to experience the Louisiana swampland,
Lake Martin is a great place to visit. In
addition to all the wading birds, warblers and
unique forest, you will also have a chance to
spot nutria and alligators! There is a
road that parallels the lake, and we will park
and walk along the lake and on a trail. |
After our trip to
Lake Martin, we stopped by the UL Lafayette Center
for Ecology and Environmental Technology to view
a variety of ongoing research projects including
a prairie restoration study site.
The
field trip was sponsored by the UL Lafayette
College of Sciences (it was free). We left
the Hotel Acadiana at 2 pm and were back
at the hotel between 5 and 6 pm.
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The 2004 Kriton Hatzios Symposium
Dr.
Caryl Chlan was organized the symposium with the theme "Cotton
Biotechnology". Invited speakers included:
Thea Wilkins
(Professor, Department of Agronomy and Range Science at the UC Davis)
"Cotton Fiber Genomics: Manipulating the Fiber Transcriptome"
tawilkins@ucdavis.edu
Web Page |
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Randy Allen
(Professor of Biological Sciences and Co-Director, Texas Tech Center for Biotechnology & Genomics,Texas Tech University)
"Strategies for modification of fiber quality and abiotic stress tolerance in cotton"
raallen@ttacs.ttu.edu
Web Page |
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Candace Haigler
(Professor of Crop Science and Botany North Carolina State University)
"Biotechnological improvement of cotton fiber maturity"
candace_haigler@ncsu.edu
Web Page |
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Student
Competitions Winners
Graduate Student Presentation
Awards
Two
talks were recognized with
cash awards. Scott M. Pelitire from the University
of New Orleans for the presentation “Functional
analysis,
subcellular localization, and gene expression patterns
of four cytochrome b5 isoforms cloned from developing
tung (Aleurites fordii Hemsl.) seeds.” and Ruby
Ynalvez from Louisiana State University for the presentation
“Characterization of an insertional mutant of
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.”
Judges for the graduate student presentations were:
Mel Oliver, Barbara Triplett, and Tim Sherman
Undergraduate
Poster Award
We
had several very impressive posters by undergraduates.
This year’s award for best undergraduate poster
went
jointly to Jamie Hogan and Ron
Butendieck from Rollins
College for their coauthored poster “Enzymatic
activity, cloning, and comparison of hydrolytic enzymes
found in Nepenthes burkei.”
Judges for the poster competition were: Jay Mellon,
Bill Outlaw, and Rickey Turley
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