BAY AREA PLANT HUB SYMPOSIUM 2026
Pauley Ballroom, 3rd Floor Martin Luther King Junior Student Union
2495 Bancroft Way, UC Berkeley, CA 94720
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9:00 – 10:00 AM REGISTRATION & COFFEE
10:00 – 11:05 AM PLENARY SESSION 1
🌍 EARTH DAY: SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE & FOOD SECURITY
10:00 – 10:10 Opening Remarks by the BAPH Committee
10:10 – 10:20 ASPB Introduction
10:20 – 10:35 Marco Burger (Salk Institute) Parasitic Plants – A World Challenge: Novel Chemicals for Strigolactone Receptor Inhibition
10:35 – 10:50 Nathalie Aoun (UC Davis) Natural variation in a NLR pair confers thermostable resistance to Ralstonia pseudosolanacearum
10:50 – 11:05 Leah Taylor-Kearney (UC Berkeley) A not-so-trivial pursuit: engineering rubisco
11:05 – 11:30 AM NETWORKING BREAK
11:30 AM – 12:35 PM PLENARY SESSION 2
GENOME ENGINEERING & PLANT BIOTECHNOLOGY
11:30 – 11:40 Sponsor Talk: Meghan McLean Poon, Partner, Morrison & Foerster
11:40 – 11:55 Vivian Zhong (Stanford) T-SWITCH: A genetic tool to measure T-DNA integration frequency and enable integration-free genome editing
11:55 – 12:10 Jorge Rodriguez (UC Berkeley) Optimizing a Compact Viral-Mediated Nuclease Delivery for Robust Heritable Plant Genome Editing
12:10 – 12:25 Charis Ramsing (UC Davis) Slipping through the cracks: how Clavibacter takes advantage of xylem structure to cause disease
12:25 – 12:35 POSTER PITCHES
- Stefan Sanow (UC Davis) – Root barriers to limit Striga
- Marlo Hall (UC Berkeley) – Recognition of bacterial T3SS in tomato
- Steven Massa (Stanford) – NAD Metabolism in Tomato-Xanthomonas
- Pranav Dawar (PNNL) – Colletotrichum proteomics and metabolomics
- Elohim Bello Bello (Salk) – Jasmonate in root mechanoadaptation
12:35 – 1:50 PM LUNCH
12:45 Table Discussions & Free poster and sponsor booth viewing begin
1:50 – 3:00 PM PLENARY SESSION 3
CELL BIOLOGY & DEVELOPMENTAL MECHANISMS
1:50 – 1:55 ASPB Ambassadors
1:55 – 2:10 Yue Rui (Stanford) Membrane nanodomains mediate stress resilience through cell wall-plasma membrane attachments
2:10 – 2:25 Magda Zaoralová (Stanford) Imaging Plant Tissues at the Nanoscale: Cryoprotectant-Free Sample Preparation for Cryo-Electron Tomography
2:25 – 2:40 Shivani Upadhyaya (UC Berkeley) TOR inhibition drives accumulation of amino acids through transcriptional activation in algae
2:40 – 2:55 Jose Avila-Peltroche (Carnegie) Blue light-dependent development in the model organism Ectocarpus: new insights into photo-development in brown seaweed
2:55 – 3:00 POSTER PITCHES
- Lam Lam (UC Berkeley) – Non-photochemical quenching
- Neda Fakhimi (Carnegie) – NADK2 and carbon partitioning
- Heejae Nam (UC Berkeley) – Multi-omics atlas of nuclear envelope
- Marco Duenas (UC Berkeley) – Lipid droplet protein in algae
- Hongtao Zhang (UC Berkeley) – Pollen development
3:00 – 3:30 PM NETWORKING BREAK
3:30 – 5:00 PM KEYNOTE SESSION
GENOMICS, EPIGENETICS & SPECIALIZED METABOLISM
3:30 – 3:50 Kat Smoot (UC Berkeley) DNA demethylation suppresses a state of enhanced cellular pluripotency and regeneration competence in Arabidopsis
3:50 – 4:10 Kehan Zhao (UC Davis) Functional Insights into Dispensable Genes Using Genome-Wide Loss-of-Function Burden Tests in Arabidopsis
4:10 – 4:30 Kamryn Diehl (UBC) Investigating cell division plane orientation in plants using harmala alkaloids
4:30 – 4:50 Alexis Lebecq (Stanford) Lineage-encoded polarity aligns sister cells to build a central stomatal pore
4:50 – 4:55 POSTER PITCHES
- James Walker (Salk) – Single-nucleus epigenomic atlas
- Chandler Sutherland (UC Berkeley) – Somatic mutation rates
- Liza Gautam (Illinois State) – CRISPR pennycress domestication
- Farida Yasmin (UC Davis) – Diterpenoid pathway in millet
- Chloe Wick (Stanford) – FoTO1 orchestrates Taxol biosynthesis
5:00 – 7:00 PM RECEPTION & POSTER SESSION
5:00 – 6:00 PM Session 1: Odd poster numbers
6:00 – 7:00 PM Session 2: Even poster numbers