NIFA Introduces FACT Program for Data Science in Agriculture

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

What We’re Reading: October 21

Featured Review: Update of Arabidopsis floral meristem formation ($) Genetic approaches using Arabidopsis have identified key players in the initiation and elaboration of floral meristems and flowers. These core findings are now expanded to encompass the roles of hormone fluxes and mechanical forces, and systems-wide modeling of gene regulatory networks. In this review, Denay et … Read more

EDITORIAL: The Plant Cell Begins Opt-in Publishing of Peer Review Reports

As of January 2017, The Plant Cell will offer authors the option of associating a Peer Review Report with each research article. Reviewer anonymity will be strictly maintained. The reports will include the major comments from reviewers and the editors’ decision letters along with the authors’ response to reviewers for each submission of the manuscript … Read more

Funding Opportunity: NSF Releases Solicitation for Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS)

Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a solicitation for a new program, Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS). This program aims to bring together the statistics, mathematics, and theoretical computer science communities to develop the theoretical foundations of data science through integrated research and training activities.  TRIPODS builds off existing investments … Read more

What We’re Reading: Oct 14th

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