As part of the 6th Congress of the Indonesian Biotechnology Consortium (KBI) held in Palembang, 1 September 2014, an International Seminar on Biotechnology was also held on 2 – 3 September 2014. The theme of this year’s congress and KBI seminar was “Biotechnology for Accelerating Food and Energy Securities. ”

The event was officially opened by the representative of the Governor of South Sumatra, H Alex Noerdin. In his remarks, the Governor offered the potential of natural resources in the province of South Sumatra to be utilized through biotechnology. The Governor also delivered various ongoing research and development in agriculture, forestry and fisheries. It is also hoped that cooperation with academics and researchers will increase the usability of South Sumatra’s natural resources through biotechnology to improve food and energy security. Meanwhile, the new director of the KBI – who was chosen at the congress event the day before, Prof. Dr. Eng. Misri Gozan, delivered his remarks while stressing the importance of the role of KBI, which has 57 members in the field of biotechnology, including BB Biogen. These various types of institutions, from academics, government agencies, NGOs, international institutions, to the private sector, are expected to be able to make a real contribution in the development of biotechnology in Indonesia. This international seminar was filled with papers from invited speakers from Indonesia and also from Austria, Germany, Singapore and the Philippines. In addition there were also parallel seminar sessions that divided the discussion topics into 3 areas: food and agricultural biotechnology, industrial biotechnology and marine biotechnology. Research posters were also displayed during the seminar.

From BB Biogen, six researchers participated in this event: Dr. Saptowo J Pardal who is a member of the 2012-2014 KBI Executive Board and a participant in the congress, Dr. I Made Tasma who delivered an oral paper with the title: “Plant Genome Re-Sequencing Projects of the Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development (IAARD)”, Dr. Puji Lestari who presented a poster titled: “Allelic Variation of Sucrose Syntahse 3 (rsu3) Gene on Five Japonica Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Varieties”, Habib Rijzaani, MSi. who brought a poster entitled: “Construction and Quality Analysis of Two Potato Genomic Libraries for Next Generation Sequencing”, and Dr. Tri Joko Santosa, and Dr. Reflinur.