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The 6th International Triticeae Symposium (6ITS), held from May 31 to June 5, 2009, in Clock Tower Centennial Hall of Kyoto University, Kyoto Japan, has closed. Tahnk you.
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The next 7th International Triticeae Symposium (7ITS), will be in 2013 in China.
The International Triticeae Symposium is a conference where experienced scientists and students from different disciplines come together for broader discussions. The 6ITS provides a platform where plant systematists can meet plant breeders, and where ecologists can interact with genomics researchers and gene bank curators. The focus for the meeting is the grass tribe Triticeae.
The symposium is held under the joint auspices of the Local Organizing Committee, International Organizing Committee and the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences (NIAS), Japan. The symposium is supported by the Kyoto University Foundation and the Japanese Society of Breeding.
The tribe Triticeae includes several of the world's most important cereal crops such as wheat, barley, triticale and rye. It includes also important,
mostly perennial, fodder grasses such as Agropyron, Elymus, Leymus, Psathyrostachys and others. Many wild annual grasses of
the tribe Triticeae belong to a highly valuable gene pool for cereal breeding - Triticum, Aegilops, Secale, Hordeum, Dasypyrum,
etc. Some of them are interesting ephemeral plants of deserts - Eremopyrum, Crithopsis, Heteranthelium. Another group is interesting
taxonomically, because they are on the border or just beyond the limit of the tribe - Brachypodium and Henrardia.
Triticeae grasses are distributed all over the Earth; however, their centre of diversity is in the temperate belt of Eurasia, North America and South America.
They accompany humans as weeds. They are important, dominant or only plants in several habitats.
They all possess a tremendous richness of genes and gene complexes useful in agricultural research and breeding. They are subjects of genetic and molecular research programmes.
They are a taxonomically controversial group at both the species and generic level. One extreme is considering Triticum to be the only genus of Triticeae,
an opposite extreme is accepting of a huge amount of (often) monotypic genera. They are of interest to environmentalists dealing with sustainable development.
The International Triticeae Symposium will be an interdisciplinary meeting of diverse scientists - geneticists, taxonomists, phylogeneticists,
genetic engineers, agriculturists, and plant breeders.