The University of Florida (UF) hosted the Genotype by Environment by Management (GxExM) Symposium II this month with 80 people attending in person and 348 people registering online. This year, the Symposium was a collaboration between the Centre for Plant Success, UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and UF Horticultural Sciences Department.
Through his work with the Centre, Mark Cooper led the creation of the Symposium last year and provided thought leadership on the kinds of questions that we should be asking. We then worked together with Graeme Hammer and Fred van Eeuwijk to identify the people who could help us better define the questions and find some partial answers.
This year we moved from inviting people to tell their truth, to building some common understanding and identifying common methodologies. With these moves, we are no longer working in isolation and are now having a dialogue, which is a great success.
These Symposia have created an opportunity for world leaders in the GxExM space to increase their collaborations and really get some traction going. As a group, we are moving towards a community of practice, and this is an invitation for us to build our community, start creating datasets that people can organise themselves around, and develop an industry that can now become accessible to the public sector.
Looking forward, the aspiration for us is to have a more fluid dialogue that will allow us to identify discrete areas of knowledge and methodologies to hopefully come closer to a common understanding. In saying that, we still hope to have creative tension in our community. It’s not that we all agree but we disagree in ways that can be conducive to better, newer methods, and facilitate open spaces for innovation and creativity.
Having support from the University of Florida in running the GxExM Symposium II has told me that we are heading in the right direction. UF is partnering with world leaders such as the Centre for Plant Success and Wageningen University and Research Biometris to build a nexus within which to advance and deploy methods to accelerate the rates of crop improvement across crops and geographies. Additionally, having Renee Lafitte from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation attend the Symposium was a humbling experience, she reminds us all of the purpose of harnessing GxExM to deliver solutions to the world’s poor, today and into the future.
The Centre has provided continuity with its support of these events, which has meant that the Symposia have not been just a once-off, and that has given us some energy. By getting this group together and having the Centre provide the space for us to build over time has been invaluable. The intellectual calibre of the Centre through Mark Cooper, Christine Beveridge, Graeme Hammer and their teams has provided diverse thinking that will help to progress this discipline forward.
I am very much looking forward to GxExM Symposium III at Wageningen University which will be led by Fred van Eeuwijk. At that event we will share what we are learning by working with the datasets that are being generated.
Lastly, I would like to extend my thanks to Lisa Tomlinson (UF), Christopher Gunter (UF) and Phoebe Baldwin (Plant Success), this event would not have come together without them. I also extend my gratitude to Centre Director Christine Beveridge for her support of this initiative and look forward to continuing my work with the Centre into the future.
Professor Carlos (Charlie) Messina
Associate Investigator, University of Florida
