Mary Williams PlantingScience is an online mentoring program that virtually connects scientists with junior high or high school students as they participate in inquiry-based activities with plants. Mentors commit to an hour or so per week over roughly two to four weeks, during which they respond to student questions and help them design and interpret their experiments. … Read more
Publications are important, but these days it takes more than a couple of nice papers to move your career to the next level. Also, increasingly scientists are looking outside the (academic) box for their next career move. ASPB provides many ways through which scientist can build their careers and diversify their skills. Here are a … Read more
Guotian Li, Rashmi Jain, and Mawsheng Chern, featured first authors of The Sequences of 1504 Mutants in the Model Rice Variety Kitaake Facilitate Rapid Functional Genomic Studies Guotian Li Current Position: Deputy Director of Grass Genetics/Project Scientist at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, a joint position between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, … Read more
Are you a creative, articulate and web-savvy plant scientist looking to connect with other like-minded folks? We need your help to nurture and grow Plantae, the online community for the global plant science community. We are looking for individuals who are interested in being highly engaged contributors by curating content and facilitating discussions. The benefits … Read more
Jennifer Wisecaver, featured first author of A Global Co-expression Network Approach for Connecting Genes to Specialized Metabolic Pathways in Plants Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University. Education: PhD (2012) Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona. BS (2007) Biological Sciences, Humboldt State University. Non-scientific Interests: Spending time with family, friends, and … Read more
Please contact Mary Williams if you’d like to discuss submitting a Teaching Tool preproprosal. Investigating Darwin’s “abominable mystery” – the angiosperms, by Sonja Dunbar Flowering plants, the angiosperms, make up roughly 1/6th of the living species currently known. This teaching tool will explore the rapid diversification and success of the flowering plants.This tool will first … Read more
Guest post by Emily Larson @erlarson_phd and Maria Papanatsiou @m_papanatsiou, postdocs at the University of Glasgow, Scotland If there is one stereotype about some scientists that contains a shred of truth it is that we are definitely indoor kids – at least professionally speaking. We spend a lot of time hunched over benches in the … Read more
There’s a new Teaching Tool in town! It’s not easy being not green: the making of a parasitic plant – By Caitlin E. Conn and David C. Nelson. This Teaching Tool explores the biology and evolution of parasitic plants, and their impact on agriculture. In the last portion of the Teaching Tool, the molecular evolution … Read more
Rakesh David, featured first author of Transcriptome-wide Mapping of RNA 5-Methylcytosine in Arabidopsis mRNAs and non-coding RNAs Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, University of Adelaide. Education: PhD, Plant Molecular Biology, Plant Science Division, Research School of Biology, Australian National University, Australia. Non-scientific Interests: Cycling, cricket, movies and reading. … Read more
May 18th is the Fascination of Plants Day, and we want to help in this international effort to highlight the importance of plants and plant science. Therefore, we’re supporting the #BotanyLive e-event! In a nutshell, we’re asking planty folks (curious, enthusiasts, professionals) to share something about their fascination with plants online. We’re particularly recommending the … Read more
We’ve been cross-posting the What We’re Reading paper summaries on both the Plant Science Today blog (here) and the Plantae blog, but starting today we’ll only be publishing them on the Plantae blog, as we want to focus Plant Science Today on ASPB news and events. So get on over to Plantae.org, see you there! … Read more
Note: Read Why We’re Writing “What We’re Reading” Review: Ion transport at the vacuole during stomatal movement Gas exchange and transpiration are regulated by the stomatal aperture, which is itself regulated by the changes in volume of the guard cells that overlie the stomatal pore. When triggered to open, solutes such as K+ and Cl– … Read more
Note: See Why We’re Writing “What We’re Reading” Review: Ammonium as a signal for physiological and morphological responses ($) Ammonium is one of the major forms in which nitrogen is assimilated. Besides being a nutrient, it also acts as signal that affects gene expression and root system architecture. Some ammonium-induced genes are also induced by … Read more
In Episode 36 of the classic comedy television show I Love Lucy, Lucy and her friend Ethel get a job wrapping chocolates in a candy factory. Their boss warns, “If one piece of candy gets past you and into the packing room unwrapped, you’re fired!” Naturally, as the candy conveyer belt moves faster and faster, … Read more
Masanori Izumi, featured first author of Entire Photodamaged Chloroplasts Are Transported to the Central Vacuole by Autophagy Current Position: Assistant Professor, Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences, Tohoku University. Education: Ph.D. (2012), Graduate School of Agricultural Sciences, Tohoku University, Japan. Non-scientific Interests: Playing tennis, Travel to Japanese hot springs. When I was an undergraduate student, … Read more
Review: Wheat genomics comes of age Due to its highly repetitive, polyploid genome, wheat genomics has lagged behind that of other cereals, but new tools promise to begin closing that gap. Uauy reviews these new tools, which include access to full genomes of several wheat varieties, gene expression data from hundreds of publicly available RNA-sequencing … Read more
Have you seen an exciting new paper you’d like to summarize for the community? Contact Mary Williams to inquire about contributing to this series! Reviews: Nature Insight: Plants ($) Nature journal published a special “Plant Insights” section featuring several excellent reviews. Zipfel and Oldroyd review Plant signalling in symbiosis and immunity (10.1038/nature22009), Bevan et al. … Read more
Guest post by Erin Sparks, Guillaume Lobet, Larry York and Frédéric Bouché It is midnight on a cold winter evening and you are scheduled to give a seminar at 8 am the next morning. All you are missing to complete your presentation is one last graphic to illustrate your conclusions. You wearily open Adobe Illustrator, … Read more
Review: Methods of cell-specific hormone analysis ($) Plant hormones are active at very small quantities and often act differently in different cell types. Various methods, primarily involving mass spectrometry and sensors, have been developed to identify and quantify hormones with cellular-level precision. Novák et al. review these methods and discuss their strengths and limitations, as … Read more
Review: The increasing impact of activity-based protein profiling in plant science Activity-based protein profiling is a proteomics approach that involves covalently labeling reporter tags to subsets of proteins based on their active sites. Morimoto and van der Hoorn define different types of probes and the types of proteins that they bind to. Activity profiling can … Read more
