On October 10th, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) convened a summit in Chicago for the purpose of identifying the future of data in agriculture and building on existing US government-wide investments in big data. NIFA Director Sonny Ramaswamy, who attended the summit, announced a new initiative named … Read more
Featured Review: Celebrating 150 years since Mendel’s Discoveries ($) This review describes Mendel’s seminal work and how it laid the foundation for today’s plant breeding (as well as all of genetics). Smýka et al. trace the evolution of our understanding from Mendel’s discrete traits through continuous traits and quantitative trait loci (including the contributions of … Read more
This Commentary, written by Emily Larson, is from the October issue of Plant Physiology. The spatial and temporal accumulation of auxins promotes and regulates polarized, gravitropic, and phototropic growth in plants. The proteins involved in initiating and maintaining the auxin gradients have been studied and remain active areas of research in the hormonal regulation of … Read more
We’re in the midst of lots of changes at ASPB and Plantae. We’ll be launching a new and improved Plantae user interface before the end of the year, and thanks to your excellent feedback we will be launching new features to accompany the new interface (watch this space!). One of these new features is the … Read more
Warmest congratulations to Yoshinori Ohsumi, 2016 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, “for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy”. Autophagy (self-eating) is a process through which cells selectively degrade and recycle cellular components. Ohsumi’s research has primarily focused on yeast, but he has also studied autophagy in plants. In fact, for the past twenty years … Read more