How can genomics help neglected crops fight disease?

Guest post by Kelsey Wood (@klsywd) a PhD student researching the genetics and genomics of plant-pathogen interactions at the University of California, Davis. I recently attended a Plant Pathology symposium on “Genomics Strategies for Developing Sustainable Disease Resistance for Neglected Crops in the Developing World“. The symposium was held at the University of California, Berkeley and … Read more

Scientific Community Responds to President Trump’s Executive Order on Immigration

Central to the global scientific and innovation enterprise is the principle of free and open scientific exchange.  Researchers need to be able to attend meetings, host international collaborators and educators, and attract the best graduate and postdoctoral trainees and job candidates.  On January 27, 2017, the Trump Administration issued an executive order entitled “Protecting the … Read more

BotanyOnline: Shared learning-support resources for improving Botanical Literacy

Guest post by Rosanne Quinelle, an Associate Professor in the School of Life and Environmental Science at the University of Sydney, Australia. Proficiency in any discipline requires exposure to both breadth and depth, where “breadth” is akin to acquiring the vocabulary and “depth” is akin to an understanding of the prevailing patterns, the rules of … Read more

What We’re Reading: January 27th

Review: The sexual advantage of looking, smelling and tasting good, the metabolic network that produces signals for pollinators ($) The interaction between angiosperms and their pollinators provides an excellent system to study co-evolution, and underpins the evolution of the biosynthesis of numerous interesting and useful specialized metabolites, from pigments to fragrances. Borghi et al. review … Read more

Travel awards for early career scientists: American Chemical Society special symposium ‘Cellulose Structure and Biosynthesis’

Thanks to support from the Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES) and the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER), we have made available a limited number of travel awards for early career scientists to attend and present a poster during a special symposium entitled ‘Cellulose Structure and Biosynthesis’ … Read more

Announcing the 2017 ASPB Womens Young Investigator Travel Award Winners

The goal of the Women’s Young Investigator Travel Award is to increase attendance at the Plant Biology annual meeting of young female investigators who are within the first five years of their appointment in academic faculty-level positions, government research positions, or industry research scientist positions, as well as experienced postdocs. Awardees must hold positions at an academic, … Read more

Announcing the 2017 Travel Grant Program Winners

The Travel Grant Program aims to increase attendance of early career scientists at the annual meeting by providing travel funds for those in financial need. Increasing diversity among the annual meeting attendees is another primary goal. Undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and professionals beginning their careers in plant science are strongly encouraged to apply. … Read more

Call for Nominations: FFAR New Innovator Award

The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) has released a call for nominations for the 2017 New Innovator in Food and Agriculture Research Award.  This is the second competition for this award, which aims to “support the next generation of food and agriculture scientists”.  While last year the award was limited to one nominee … Read more

President’s Letter: Adjusting to an Uncertain Future

As we enter 2017, plant biologists face uncertainty with the arrival of President Trump. The new administration has provided few hints about a position on science, and what comments have been made appear worrisome. A Trump administration is not what most of us were expecting based on polling data and, in fact, was not what … Read more

Recognizing featured Plant Cell first authors, December 2016

Recently, we’ve been profiling first authors of Plant Cell papers that are selected for In Brief summaries. Here are the first-author profiles from the December issue of The Plant Cell. Yao-Pin Lin, featured author of Identification of Chlorophyll Dephytylase Involved in Chlorophyll Turnover in Arabidopsis Current Position: Postdoctoral fellow in Agricultural Biotechnology Research Center, Academia … Read more

What We’re Reading: Dec 16

Previewing Pollen Biology special issue of Plant Physiology In Plant Physiology Preview you can get a head start on reading the excellent set of articles from a forthcoming special issue on Pollen Biology. Updates and research articles cover all aspects of this crucial part of reproductive biology, from the complex cell biology that underpins polar … Read more

Best of 2016: Top Topics in The Plant Cell journal

We’ve highlighted some of the Plant Cell papers that were widely shared, liked, blogged, retweeted and otherwise garnered high-levels of attention this year. Perhaps you can use some holiday-season quiet time to catch up on those you missed. Reviews and Perspectives Creating order from chaos: epigenome dynamics in plants with complex genomes http://www.plantcell.org/content/28/2/314 Advancing Crop … Read more

Best of 2016: Top Topics in The Plant Cell journal

We’ve highlighted some of the Plant Cell papers that were widely shared, liked, blogged, retweeted and otherwise garnered high-levels of attention this year. Perhaps you can use some holiday-season quiet time to catch up on those you missed. Reviews and Perspectives Creating order from chaos: epigenome dynamics in plants with complex genomes http://www.plantcell.org/content/28/2/314 Advancing Crop … Read more

Best of 2016: Top Topics in Plant Physiology journal

We’ve highlighted some of the Plant Physiology papers that were widely shared, liked, blogged, retweeted and otherwise garnered high-levels of attention this year. Perhaps you can use some of that holiday-season quiet time to catch up on those you missed. The breakaway attention-getter from Plant Physiology this year was “Mechanosensitivity below ground: touch-sensitive smell-producing roots … Read more

What We’re Reading: December 9

Review: Domestication and Breeding of Jatropha curcas L. Jatropha curcas L. is a drought-tolerant perennial angiosperm in the in the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae. As such, it has a high untapped potential to meet the food and bioenergy demands of the world. Montes and Melchinger review the current status of the progress in Jatropha domestication and … Read more

Recognizing featured Plant Cell first authors, November 2016

Recently, we’ve been profiling first authors of Plant Cell papers that are selected for In Brief summaries. Here are the first-author profiles from the November issue of The Plant Cell. Jaewook Kim, Kijong Song, and Eunae Park, featured authors of Epidermal Phytochrome B Inhibits Hypocotyl Negative Gravitropism Non-Cell Autonomously Jaewook Kim Current Position: Graduate student, … Read more

Contribute to Plant Image Collection (PIC) Week

Plant image analysis is a growing field in the plant community. From the cell level to the canopy, many tools were developed in the last few years, most of which are referenced on the plant-image-analysis.org website. These tools helped analysing thousands of images, leading to many publications. However, these images were rarely made available to … Read more

What We’re Reading: Dec 2

Featured Review: Programmed Cell Death in Development and Disease Programmed cell death (PCD) is an active process that occurs as part of normal development and also contributes to defense against pathogens. While there are many similarities in developmental PCD (dPCD) and pathogen-triggered PCD (pPCD), there are also differences. Huysmans et al. review and contrast these … Read more

Think Phenome 2017! Metadata Analysis and Challenges

Here’s a sneak preview of what will be presented at the upcoming Phenome 2017 conference, to be held on Feb. 10-14 in Tucson, AZ. Phenome 2017 will provide a unique opportunity for plant biologists, engineers, computer and information scientists, chemists, mathematicians, geologists, physicists, and meteorologists to mingle, forge collaborations, share insights, and develop strategies to … Read more