In early October, Suayb, fellow postdoc Thorben and I headed to probably the best country in the world for the Post-transcriptional Gene Regulation in Plants (PGRP) conference in Málaga. Apart from a couple of hours locked out of our accommodation (happily spent exploring Spanish vermouths), the trip went smoothly, which is surprising knowing our collective bad luck with transport and the extra risk of involving Deutsche Bahn.
It was our lab first time at this meeting, since we have traditionally worked on and attended conferences more specialized in proteolysis and cell biology. Stepping outside of our usual field was challenging at times, but it was extremely refreshing and gave us new ideas and very valuable feedback.
The conference kicked off with an amazing keynote lecture by Hervé Vaucheret (IJPB Paris, France), where he gave a historical and very personal perspective on the discovery and study of systemic post-transcriptional gene silencing. First observed in petunia in the 90s, Hervé presented all his work over the decades, switching from Nicotiana to Arabidopsis as model plants, dissecting the molecular mechanisms, biological roles and evolutionary origin of this pathway. This talk also showed us how an unexpected observation during your PhD can become the topic that shapes your whole future research career. So for all early-career researchers out there: keep an eye on those weird results!
The translation session: our comfort zone (kind of)
From all sessions, I would personally highlight the translation session (choice biased by my own project and expertise, rather than by the scientific quality of the other sessions). Polly Hsu (Michigan State University, USA) opened the session with a very enthusiastic keynote talk on the unexpectedly large number of newly discovered upstream open reading frames (uORFs), potentially present in 55% of Arabidopsis genes. She then focused on a new type, the overlapping uORFs, which span the start codon of the main ORF and act as even stronger translational repressors [1]. Other great talks in this session included Rémy Merret (IBMP Strasbourg, France), who presented unpublished work about the novel role of a protein well-known to our group, which, in addition to its well-characterized roles in stress responses, appears to be involved in co-translational mRNA decay. In this line, Daniel Gibbs (University of Birmingham, UK) showed how the E3 ligase NOT4 acts together with the master regulator TOR to couple translation and protein quality control, ensuring the proportionality between both processes to maintain protein homeostasis [2]. A very nice piece of work (and I am not highlighting it just because we participated in the study). Julia Bailey-Serres (UC Riverside, USA), a staple of this meeting since the very first PGRP in California back in 1997, explained how different ways of stopping ribosomes can be detected and lead to different outcomes, from pausing protein synthesis to triggering co-translational mRNA decay [3]. Last, Neha Shukla (CEITEC, Czechia) introduced meiotic bodies (M-bodies), a composite ribonucleoprotein granule specific to meiotic cells involved in decoupling transcriptional and translational regulation during highly-demanding and coordinated meiotic processes [4], a work that I took to our own journal club a couple of weeks later. This session also included several flash talks, including mine, where I pitched our recently published work on how pathogens manipulate plant processing bodies (P-bodies) to attenuate translation and promote disease [5].
Won’t somebody please think of the RNA?
Despite my unfortunate ignorance on the topics, I also really enjoyed the more RNA-centred previous sessions. In the RNA silencing session, Marco Incarbone (MPI Potsdam, Germany) talked about vertical transmission of viruses [6]. Also in this session Felipe Fenselau de Felippes (QUT, Australia) talked about the overlooked importance of 3’UTRs for mRNA stability and presented a newly discovered terminator that improves transgene expression [7]. During the RNA modification session, Claudia Cortés de Felipe (SLU, Sweden) presented her PhD project on plant P-bodies and stress granules in different viral infections, building on seminal work from which even my own project arose back in the day.
Last, opening the RNA processing session came one of the nicest talks of the whole conference: Rosa Lozano-Durán (ZMBP Tübingen, Germany). She showed how, while studying the viral replication machinery, they found an unexpected connection with alternative splicing, and how alternative splicing impacted not only plant transcripts but also viral ones in a negative feedback loop that controls excessive viral replication [8]. This work exemplifies and expands the versatility and functionality of small viral genomes, addressing “the small genome paradox” with which she started her beautiful talk.
But a conference is not only talks
Of course, a conference is more than an opportunity to hear and share the most recent work. Conferences are also opportunities to network: meet new people and see former colleagues and friends spread all over the world. In addition to the different coffee/lunch breaks, often accompanied by very nice Spanish finger food and drinks (though maybe not always perfect for a certain vegetarian colleague of ours), we also had very lively poster sessions. During these sessions, although a bit tight in space (maybe intended to promote close scientific discussions), Thorben and I showcased our projects about P-bodies in abiotic and biotic stress respectively, in front of a totally new audience and got lots of feedback. We could also explore what other people are doing. Seeing posters as nice as Agathe Vercelletto’s (IBMP Strasbourg, France) on the degradation of an AGO protein (SPOILER ALERT: her poster was so nice she was awarded a poster prize in the Plant Proteostasis conference one week later, but this is up to my colleagues to tell you), or Dominique Vuarambon’s (University of Bern, Switzerland) on the role of P-body component DCP5, was a treat. The latter showed results that nicely matched my own, strengthening the reproducibility of our research and calming me down after several rounds of students made me doubt my own experiments!
Conclusion and fanboy moment of the week
Although intense, the conference was overall extremely stimulating and made us bring back home lots of ideas, as well as new problems to think about. For instance, I was always scared that my constructs were not expressed enough. Now I have learnt that expressing too much can lead to silencing, that using the wrong terminator can promote quick degradation of the transcript or that modifying the third nucleotide of a codon to G/C can strongly increase protein synthesis. As if I didn’t have enough problems just cloning…
But this conference not only opened our minds, it was also technically very helpful. As we’ve just started working on polysome profiling and Ribo-seq ourselves, being able to directly ask and troubleshoot first-hand with the very same people who established these methods in plants was a golden opportunity (fanboy moment of the week). Doing so over nice Spanish tapas by the Mediterranean Sea was just the cherry on top!
Post-transcriptional Gene Regulation in Plants (PGRP), 5-7th Oct. 2026, Málaga
Report by Manuel González-Fuente