Mary Williams 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 November’s issue of The Plant Cell. Sascha Venturelli, featured co-first author of Plants Release Precursors of Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors to Suppress Growth of Competitors Current Position: Senior researcher at the Department of … Read more
Guest post from Sonja Dunbar, PhD student at the University of Cambridge Plants need nutrients and they have a lot of different ways to acquire them from the soil, as the 2nd year undergraduate students I teach at the University of Cambridge recently discovered in lectures. One thing our lecture courses try to emphasise at … Read more
In her book “It takes a village”, Hillary Clinton observed that adults outside the family have profound impacts on the development of a child, and advocated for society to better meet children’s needs. We raise scientists in much the same way we raise children, often in small groups with one or two mentors (and sometimes … Read more
Normally, our Friday posts highlight plants featured in the news over the past week, but this week we take a short break to make an appeal for your thoughts on the most notable and newsworthy plant-related events, resources, breakthroughs and headline makers of the past year. Here are the stories we featured last year as … Read more
Plants that do the unexpected or that don’t conform to stereotype command attention and serve as portals to the diversity of the plant kingdom. Litter-trapping plants have an unusual and interesting strategy for obtaining nutrients. Zona and Christenhusz (2015), writing in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, describe plants that have evolved specialized adaptations … Read more
Recent fires in Indonesia have been making headlines around the world and raising concerns about their impacts on wildlife, global carbon emissions and health problems for local people. Fires have been a recurring problem for many years, but this year they are exacerbated by drought conditions caused by a strong El Niño event. Since September … Read more
Metabolism is a widely-used term. It is used colloquially, as in, “My metabolism slowed down once I hit 40,” a usage that considers metabolism as a black box and focuses on its energetic inputs and outputs. Or, there’s the single-reaction view of metabolism, as in, “He doesn’t metabolize alcohol very well.” This view underpins the … Read more
This week we celebrate pineapples, in honor of the completion of the sequencing of the pineapple (Ananas comosus) genome and the insights it provides into an important metabolic pathway (Ming et al., 2015). Pineapples are more than just tasty tropical fruit, they’re also one of many plants able to carry out a special form of … Read more
*Note that we use the term biohacking as it has been used since 1988 to refer to DIY biology (Strange, 1988). More recently biohacking has been used also to refer to strategies to enhance the human body through wearable technology and nutritional supplements. Imagine a typical industrial process – say the production of gasoline or … Read more
The 400th anniversary of the founding of plant science at Oxford will be celebrated on July 25 2021 (see its history). As a celebration and count-down to this anniversary, the University of Oxford Botanic Garden and Harcourt Arboretum, together with the Oxford University Herbaria and the Department of Plant Sciences, are highlighting 400 plants of … Read more
Tired of the same old Halloween decorations? Maybe you’re ready for Booo-tany! There are plenty of plants that embody spooky themes, and what could be cooler than dressing up as a corpse flower or parasitic dodder? (If you do, send photos….). Here we highlight just a few of the Booo-tanical wonders to inspire your … Read more
The Plant Cell is introducing a new category of research article entitled “Breakthrough Reports” (see the Editorial October 2015) to provide a home in the journal for studies that might not provide a “complete” mechanistic story but nevertheless are deemed to present exciting new data and ideas that may open new avenues of investigation. Breakthrough … Read more
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 October’s issue of The Plant Cell. Suzanne Gerttula, featured author of Transcriptional and Hormonal Regulation of Gravitropism of Woody Stems in Populus Current Position: Volunteer Scientist, US Forest Service, Davis CA. Education: … Read more
This week we feature mangroves, a polyphyletic group of plants that live in tropical intertidal zones. Mangroves are in the news as a consequence of a new paper out in Nature (Lovelock et al., 2015) that describes their great vulnerability to sea-level rise (see also Saintilan et al., 2015). Mangrove is a term used … Read more
The biggest news in plant science is the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Tu Youyou for her discovery and development of the antimalarial drug artemisinin from the plant Artemisia annua. The other half of the prize was shared by Satoshi Ōmura and William C. Campbell for the development avermectins, also … Read more
We had many excellent proposals submitted for the second round of the the “Teaching Tools in Plant Biology” competition, from which we selected two for further development. The competition has one additional submission deadline December 31 2015, and full details can be found at https://blog.aspb.org/2015/03/02/share-your-enthusiasm-teaching-tools-submission-competition/. Here are the two winning proposals and their authors from … Read more
This week we feature an article published by Stenberg et al in Trends in Plant Science that describes the potential benefits of optimizing crops for biocontrol of pests. It is difficult to estimate the true costs of herbivore damage to crop plants, but it is clearly in the billions of dollars; much more when pesticide … Read more
I went with my sons (22 & 17) and they loved it too, so that’s three thumbs up (we each gave it five out of five stars). The filmmakers have taken a great book and modified it slightly to make a fast-paced, visually stunning, engaging, and even funny movie. I particularly appreciated the fact that … Read more
This week, Nature published an excellent Outlook on cannabis science and policy. How do you feel about cannabis as a topic of discussion in the classroom? I’ve tended to shy away from it – in my experience the benefit of increased interest can be outweighed by the distraction of giggles and jokes. However, this … Read more
Recognizing our Authors is a regular blog series that profiles ASPB’s most highly cited authors. Recently, we’ve been profiling first authors of Plant Cell papers that are selected for In Brief summaries. Here we present the first-author profiles from September’s issue of The Plant Cell. Jonathan Flowers, featured author of Whole-Genome Resequencing Reveals Extensive Natural … Read more