Saskatoon hosts international conference on agriculture research

WATCH: The Remai Modern is hosting many international guests for a conference on the agricultural applications of synchrotron research.

Saskatoon is home to one of Canada’s most powerful scientific tools, and now the city is bringing together minds from across the globe to best utilize it.

The Canadian Light Source is a synchrotron, located at the University of Saskatchewan, which welcomes users from across Canada and the world.

“It’s the fanciest, biggest, most wonderful microscope that we have in our city. So, it’s a football stadium sized microscope that allows you to do really fun and important research. Many different questions can be addressed with this fancy tool that we have right here in our backyard,” assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan in the Department of Biology, Teagen Quilichini, said.

Saskatoon is home to Canada’s synchrotron, and it is an important tool in several fields of study, including agriculture.

“Synchrotron is essentially a big machine to generates light, very bright light with special properties that scientists use to look at objects like plants, like soil, and discover things that you can’t discover anywhere else in Canada,” Chief Science officer of the Canadian Light Source, Ingrid Pickering, said.

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The Pan American Light Sources for Agriculture is a conference created by the Canadian Light Source, which fosters collaboration between the Canadian, American, and Brazilian synchrotron facilities.

“These three great organizations gathered together and said, ‘We should have a conference that has to do with the applications of synchrotrons in agriculture,’” Pickering said.

Going into its fourth year, the conference is an opportunity to compare research and learn from one another regarding the many ways synchrotrons can be used in advancing agriculture. This year’s theme is advancing sustainable agriculture and food research.

“Sometimes the most intimidating thing is figuring out how your research question or research program, if you’re a professor at a different university, can align with what the light source offers. So, hopefully, we are just highlighting those capabilities to each other to open new doors. I’m certainly taking notes and thinking about how I can use different beamlines that I currently use in my research,” Quilichini said.

According to Pickering, the ideas and conversations on display at this conference are important now more than ever.

“It’s also an opportunity, in a time when things are changing, to adapt to that. So, we also need to look at the increasing population and recognize that it’s a time when we need to deploy our high-technology approaches to study agriculture,” Pickering said.