The conference facility for #PlantBio2026 is near to the National Gallery of Canada, with "Maman" by Louise Bourgeois providing a spidery welcome. If you look closely you can see her 32 marble egg cases attached to her abdomen.

Visit the AgBioData booth at #PlantBio2026 for updates on your fave DB. Asher and Marcela represent the BAR and the AgBioData Consortium here, respectively.

Tamar Av-Shalom, a PhD student in @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social, tells us about stomatal closure, triggered by a P. syringae effector, in the #PlantBio2026 Biotic Stress concurrent session.

Dolf Weijers from Wageningen tells us about 1000s of sites that are phosphorylated after exposure to auxin...a Shiny app "AuxPhos" is available for exploration of the data. #PlantBio2026

Lucia Strader from the Salk tells us about how the "messy spaghetti" 🍝 of intrinsically disordered regions does the heavy lifting in transcriptional activation, during this morning's plenary session on auxin, identified using 70k fragments from Arabidopsis TFs...wow 😲. New tool can predict ADs.

Good turnout for the AI in Plant Biology workshop, with co-chair Carol Huang from NYU! The crowd might thin out when the World Cup final starts towards the end ⚽😁

Asher Pasha from the BAR, Tanya Berardini from @tairnews.bsky.social and other speakers tell us about the lastest and greatest bioinformatic tools in the AgBioData workshop #PlantBio2026

Shelley Lumba from @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social tells us about the role of strigolactones, both in plant development, and in attracting beneficial and less happily parasitic plants like Striga. #PlantBio2026

Plant Biology 2026 🌿, jointly hosted by ASPB and CSPB, kicks off in Ottawa with beautiful weather (smoke from recent wildfires has cleared, allowing for a good view of Canada's Parliament Buildings from the Rogers' Centre where the conference is being held).

Sue Rhee from MSU, who leads the Centre for Sustainable Plant Innovation and Reslience through International Teamwork (c-spirit.org), kicks off our yearly in-person meeting in Yokohama!

Closing keynote 1: Niko Geldner, Uni. Lausanne, on root barrier formation. #icar2026

The last speaker of the session is Ari Sadanandom of Durham Uni. in the UK, on the role of SUMO in plant responses. #icar2026

The 2nd speaker is Ildoo Hwang from Pohang Uni. in South Korea, who is talking about the intriguing idea of the vasculature as a signaling hub. #icar2026

Meng-xian Sun from Wuhan kicks off the last plenary session on signal transduction with a talk on the role of parental genes in plant reproduction. #icar2026

The last speaker is Xander Jones from TSL will tell us about the biosensors his lab develops to dissect plant environmental responses. #icar2026

Tatsuya Nobori from TSL is introduced as a rising star in the area of single cell dissection of plant immunity. #icar2026

Jijie Chai from Westlake University in China kicks off the Tools and Techniques plenary session attempting to provide a unified model of NLR signaling in plants. #icar2026

The last speaker in the translation session is Dominique Van Der Straeten from the University of Ghent on changes in nutritional quality in response to abiotic stresses, using machine learning. #icar2026

Up next, Blake Meyers from UC Davis on the role of small RNAs in plant reproduction, with a punny subtitle 🙂. #icar2026

Jian-Min Zhou from CAS in Beijing kicks off the 4th plenary session on translating knowledge from Arabidopsis into crops. He's focusing on plant immunity. #icar2026

After the #icar2026 conference dinner at Gardens by the Bay, I checked out the Double Helix Bridge connecting the two sides of the bay (I had seen it from afar on a boat tour Monday). It has lights embedded in it with the 4 nucleotides, as base pairs: A-T and G-C!

Beautiful location and delicious food for the #icar2026 conference dinner at Gardens by the Bay.

Last speaker in the biotech session is Tao-Ho Chang from NCHU in Taiwan, telling us about new imaging approaches for studying beneficial microbe interactions 🦠🔬 #icar2026

Feng Zhang from U. Minnesota tells us about gene editing in plants. #icar2026

Seonyeong Kwak from SNU in South Korea tells us about nanosensors for real time plant health monitoring. #icar2026

Qiangshan Wei from NCSU is speaking in the Plant Biotech session on "wearable sensors" for plant health that can be read with a smartphone! #icar2026

Sureshkumar Balasubramanian from Monash University finishes the abiotic session exploring temperature sensing. #icar2026

Up next, Prof. Dame Caroline Dean from JIC tells us about temperature sensing in plants and gives a shout out to Arabidopsis! #icar2026

Day 3 of #icar2026 kicks off a plenary session on abiotic stress with a talk by Shuhua Yang from CAU.

The wild chickens of NUS - especially the roosters 🐓- mean you don't need an alarm clock at #icar2026 (the jet lag also helps)