The "Plant Genomics European Meeting" (Plant GEM) is an annual meeting on the subject of genomics in all its facets. It was sponsored by national plant genomics programmes in Europe.

Latest developments in genome and genomics research are proceeding at an ever increasing speed. The amount of information that has become available with the completion of the sequences of Arabidopsis, Rice, Poplar, and the ongoing sequence efforts in other species, like maize, wheat, barley, tomato, potato, legumes and many others are giving scientists informational resources almost beyond imagination. In parallel, developments in the use of natural variation, in proteomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics, and the development of resources like clone libraries, T-DNA knockout lines, RNAi lines etc. opening new doors for research and innovations. With these developments new fields of research are emerging. Integrative disciplines as systems biology or molecular ecology are only two examples. The ongoing discussions in our societies about the effects of global climate change, the need for an improvement of renewable resources, safer and healthier food are guiding the developments towards the so called "Knowledge Based Bio-Economy" where plants and therefore plant research are in the spot light.

EVOLTREE dissemination activities:
   - Michele Morgante is a programme board member of the conference