Plant molecular biology has advanced rapidly over the past 3 decades. Great progress was achieved with the adoption of Arabidopsis as a main model system and with new technologies such as genomics and proteomics. In Europe, a strong plant science research community played a leading role. This is reflected in the great success of the first EMBO Conference Series on Plant Molecular Biology, which was completed 2 years ago. The new EMBO Conference Series has been approved last year and will continue in September this year by 1st. meeting of this series “The Interdisciplinary Plant Development”. This event will be focused on different interdisciplinary and integrative approaches such as quantitative real time imaging, computational modelling, analysis of the physical properties of tissues and exploitation of different species comparisons. The proposed 2nd conference in the series “Signalling in plant development” will complement this year event and focus on signalling events at different levels of organization in plant cells such as proteins, cells, tissues and interaction with environment. The focus will be on integrating various interdisciplinary methodologies in order to approach from all available angles the signalling events shaping various aspects of plant development and show them also in evolutionary context.