Texas Genome Editing Symposium

Texas A&M University’s (TAMU) Genome Editing Symposium is an annual graduate‐student‐organized event focused on the accelerating field of genome‐editing technologies and includes talks from pioneers in the field, graduate student travel scholar presentations, TAMU student presentations and competitions, and inspiring conversations about gene editing. Graduate students involved in the organization come from diverse academic backgrounds and are often actively involved in gene‐editing studies.

The sixth annual Genome Editing Symposium (https://bit.ly/3sRbsF6) takes place on Oct. 13, 2023 at the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center. This year’s speakers include Dr. Thom Saunders, Director of the Transgenic Animal Core Facility at the University of Michigan; Dr. Jeffrey Barrick, recipient of the Lorene Morrow Kelley Professorship in Microbiology at the University of Texas at Austin; Dr. Matt Burg, Director of Process Development at Solid Biosciences; and Dr. Washington da Silva, USDA virologist and plant pathologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

You can check out the recording from last year’s symposium on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@texasamuniversitygenomeedi7329. The 2022 symposium included four faculty speakers and two graduate student travel scholars from institutions across the U.S. Our faculty speakers last year included Dr. Jun Wu from the University of Texas Southwestern, Dr. Guo‐Wing Song from Michigan State University, Dr. Wusheng Liu from North Carolina State University, and Dr. Robert Jinkerson from the University of California–Riverside. Our graduate student travel scholars included Ephraim Aliu from Iowa State University and Tracy Hawk from the University of Tennessee. Collectively, these presentations featured wide‐ranging topics of genome‐editing applications from stem cell research to growing tomato fruits de novo in space. Drs. Christine Shyu and Francis Beecher from Bayer Crop Sciences, one of the symposium’s top industry sponsors, facilitated exciting conversations that demonstrated the need for academia and industry to work more closely together to reach our shared goals of crop improvement and sustainable agriculture. The organizing committee is grateful to our speakers and sponsors for making last year’s symposium such a memorable and inspiring event!