NEWS

EPSO wishes to encourage the development of ideas and imaginative thinking in the plant sciences and, therefore, offers two awards to young scientists to attending the Science Day of the EPSO General Meeting to be held in a city of a member (in Europe) in June 2023.

The awards will cover registration and travel and the awardee can present a lecture on her / his research during a plenary session of the Science Day and will receive €200. Applications are invited from PhD students working on either fundamental or applied aspects of research on plants. One award will be offered in each category.

Awards will be chosen based on submitted abstracts. The selection criteria will be:

• The novelty of the idea or approach being taken
• The potential of the research to improve understanding or outcomes in the selected field of plant science
• The clarity with which the problem or research topic is conveyed to a non-specialist plant scientist.

PhD students wishing to apply should submit the completed Application Form which includes as well their abstract and their short curriculum vitae. The EPSO jury will select two winners, one from the fundamental research category, the other from the applied research category.

Applicants can be nominated by others, and to be eligible they should be working in an institute/university that has EPSO institutional membership (check online). Please send your entry to [email protected] with the subject “EPSO Young Plant Scientist Award 2023” until 31.1.2023.

For details, please refer to the Full Call Notice

Contact: Karin Metzlaff ([email protected])

The 16th European-wide seminar of the series by the European Plant Science Organisation (EPSO) and aimed at the Plant Science community and its stakeholders.

TTT: The seminar will be held online each third Thursday of the month at three (CET). 

On 20^th October 2022 at 15:00 (CET) we will present three talks exploring the “On and off-target effects during Genome Editing using different nucleases’

 

Prof. Jens Boch, Leibniz University of Hannover Germany “Using GE to understand bacterial plant pathogens and their weapons”

 

 

  Dr Fabien Nogué, INRAE, Versailles, France “Specificity of plant genome editing by both CRISPR-Cas9 and TALEN”

 

 

  Dr Johannes Stuttmann, Julius Kuehn Institute, Quedlinburg, Germany “Hidden treasures: Detection of Cas9-induced on- and off-target effects by genome sequencing”

 

 

 The seminars will be hosted on Zoom and last approximately 1.5 hours. Numbers will be limited to 300 attendees and therefore please register early if you would like to join. There will be ample opportunities to ask questions and join the debate. So please join us to support this new and exciting initiative for European Plant Science by following this link just prior to the start of the seminar.

EPSO members register in advance for this meeting:

https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUvc-CsrDwtGNekQfYxQm3R7Yy9nzAe-Uww

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

In the coming months we will be on the lookout for talented plant scientists among the EPSO membership to present their findings and perspectives to the EPSO seminar series. If we approach you to talk, we hope you will be happy to support the initiative. This is a fantastic opportunity for both eminent world leaders and talented up-and-coming early career researchers to present their research to an international audience and to network with potential collaborators. If you wish to suggest a theme for one of the autumn seminars and / or nominate yourself or one of your colleagues to give a seminar, we most welcome your suggestions. Please contact Tim George ([email protected]) to provide your name and potential talk title.

We look forward to seeing you all for the 16^th EPSO seminar on the 20^th October 2022

 Tim George, Alan Schulman and Marie-Theres Hauser

EPSO Plant Science Seminar Series Organising Committee

Click here to read: Full EPSO news item

Contacts:

Tim George, Hutton / UK & EPSO Board

Alan Schulman, LUKE / FI & EPSO President

Marie-Theres Hauser BOKU / AT & EPSO Board

On 17 May 2022, the European Commission launched the 2022 LIFE Call, with a budget of 755.5 million €. The deadline for Standard Action projects (SAPs), the most relevant instrument for plant scientists, is 4 October 2022. Other deadlines are spread from September 2022 to March 2023 depending on the call.

LIFE is the EU’s funding instrument for the environment and climate action. LIFE projects support policy implementation. Research is not the main focus but should be part of a LIFE project.

 

EPSO-CINEA webinar:

To help EPSO members developing competitive proposals, EPSO is organizing with CINEA a webinar on the LIFE programme on 12 September 2022, 10am to 12pm CET. CINEA is the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency, established by the European Commission to administer the LIFE programme.

 

The webinar will cover the following aspects of the LIFE programme for plant scientists:

• General overview
• Relevance to plant scientists
• LIFE projects as examples
• Standard Action Projects (SAPs), most relevant to plant scientists.
• Main differences to previous years.

 

Register now to the webinar: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAkcuuurTIqGtXT-Hcg8Xhtyrvw4FPAphIw

 

EPSO LIFE briefing on the members only website: the LIFE Work Programme 2022 

EPSO Members, except external Personal Members, can contact Sofia Ciravegna [email protected] for access to the EPSO Members’ Only website.

 

Find more details in the full news item

 

The 15th European-wide seminar of the series by the European Plant Science Organisation (EPSO) and aimed at the Plant Science community and its stakeholders.

TTT: The seminar will be held online each third Thursday of the month at three (CET).

 

On 15^th September 2022 at 15:00 (CET) we will present three talks exploring the “Data Science for Understanding Plants”.

 Dr. Franziska Turck,  Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Germany – “Chromatin 2.0 – a pitch for cracking the cis-regulatory code with the help of Deep Neural Networks”

 Dr Alisandra Denton, Heinrich Heine University, Germany – “Annotating Eukaryotic genomes with Deep Learning” 

 Dr Thomas Hartwig, Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Germany –“Deciphering the functional plant genome by high-throughput cistrome analysis”

 

The seminars will be hosted on Zoom and last approximately 1.5 hours. Numbers will be limited to 300 attendees and therefore please register early if you would like to join. There will be ample opportunities to ask questions and join the debate. So please join us to support this new and exciting initiative for European Plant Science by following this link just prior to the start of the seminar.

 

EPSO members register in advance for this meeting:

https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYofumtpzMpGNy5RWeg0i0qKXlHNmi5glEx

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

 

In the coming months we will be on the lookout for talented plant scientists among the EPSO membership to present their findings and perspectives to the EPSO seminar series. If we approach you to talk, we hope you will be happy to support the initiative. This is a fantastic opportunity for both eminent world leaders and talented up-and-coming early career researchers to present their research to an international audience and to network with potential collaborators. If you wish to suggest a theme for one of the aumtumn seminars and / or nominate yourself or one of your colleagues to give a seminar, we most welcome your suggestions. Please contact Tim George ([email protected]) to provide your name and potential talk title.

 

We look forward to seeing you all for the 15^th EPSO seminar on the 15^th September 2022

 

Tim George, Alan Schulman and Marie-Theres Hauser

EPSO Plant Science Seminar Series Organising Committee

 

 

Click here to read: Full EPSO news item

 

 Contacts:

• Tim George, Hutton / UK & EPSO Board
• Alan Schulman, LUKE / FI & EPSO President
• Marie-Theres Hauser BOKU / AT & EPSO Board

 

While the plan contains all the well-known grant schemes: Starting, Consolidator, Advanced and Synergy Grants, there are also new elements:

• The budget for the Proof of Concept grant scheme will increase from €25 million to €30 million
• Two additional grounds for extension of the eligibility windows for the candidates for Starting and Consolidator Grants will be introduced for researchers seeking asylum or being a victim of a natural disaster
• A special grant is foreseen to support ERC Science Journalism Initiative that will entail a support for journalists wishing to spend time at research institutions to better understand frontier research

EPSO encourages its members to already prepare and then submit proposals to the ERC 2023 calls following the calendar below.  In addition to the resources listed below, EPSO foresees to publish its Horizon Europe WP 2023-2024 briefing in quarter four of 2022.

How and when to apply for ERC grants?

The Work Programme published today includes a tentative calendar of grant competitions. The call for Starting Grants is planned to open on 12 July 2022. The Synergy Grant call is set to follow one day later on 13 July 2022.

	Starting Grant	Consolidator Grant	Advanced Grant	Synergy Grant	Proof of Concept Grant
Call opens	12/07/2022	28/09/2022	08/12/2022	13/07/2022	20/10/2022
Call deadline (cut-off deadline)	25/10/2022	02/02/2023	23/05/2023	08/11/2022	24/01/2023 20/04/2023 14/09/2023
Indicative date for signature of grant agreements	23/12/2023	06/04/2024	17/08/2024	02/04/2024	07/09/2023 24/11/2023 19/04/2024

Resources:

The last two resources are available on the EPSO Member only website, under Multinational Funding Programme > Horizon Europe > Briefings & Information session

• European Commission’s ERC Work Programme 2023
• EPSO chapter on ERC proposals in the EPSO Briefing for Horizon Europe Work programme 2021-22, 29.09.2021 (ERC p 23-28)
• ERC-EPSO information session recording at the 2021 PBE conference with useful hints for proposals.

 

EPSO Members, except external Personal Members, can contact Sofia Ciravegna [email protected] for access to the EPSO Members’ Only website.

 

Wishing you success with your proposals

 

Karin Metzlaff, Alexandra Barnoux and Alan Schulman

 

Source: ERC, 12.07.2022

On 17 May 2022, the EC launched the 2022 LIFE Call, with a dedicated budget for LIFE of €755.5 million, the deadlines are going from September 2022 to March 2023 depending on the call.

LIFE is the EU’s funding instrument for the environment and climate action. It is not part of the Horizon Europe programme, but under the same EU multi-annual financial framework. LIFE projects support policy implementation. Research is not the main focus but should be part of a LIFE project. LIFE projects only provide co-financing. Thus, you always need another financial source for the remaining amount.

Note that operating grants, especially the Standard Action Projects, are relevant for plant scientists.

 

The main deadlines are:

• SAPs (Standard Action projects) – Most relevant for plant scientists: 4 October 2022
• Preparatory Project (PLP): 7 September 2022
• Technical Assistance Projects (TAPs): 8 September 2022
• Strategic Projects (SPs)
  • Phase I (concept note): 8 September 2022
  • Strategic Projects (SPs) Phase II (full proposal) : 30 March 2023

 

You can access the EPSO updated briefing on the LIFE Work Programme 2022 at the EPSO Members-Only Website. There is no major change compared to the LIFE Call 2021.

 

EPSO Members, except external Personal Members, can contact Sofia Ciravegna [email protected] for access to the EPSO Members’ Only website.