Celebrating basic plant science

In case you missed this, here’s news of a charming series that aims to present vignettes of current plant science research and researchers within a broader educational remit of promoting the importance of basic plant science. As such it could be useful for impressing upon those supposedly impressionable early-stage undergraduates the relevance of phytology, and might also have a role to play in wider outreach evangelising of the importance of plant biology. Anyway, this first – of many? – in the series showcases the work of Siobhan Braybrook, Career Development Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Sainsbury Laboratory. Penned by Siobhan, it explains her fundamental work on aspects of plant development – including the important role of pectin in determining cell wall expansion – and discusses why such basic plant science is value for money. A little gem from GARNet (a sponsored network that supports arabidopsis researchers and the wider plant community).
[GARnet is in turn sponsored by the BBSRC (Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council), a major UK government-funded sponsor of biological research. Another ‘importance of basic plant science’ item you might be interested in is the University of Cambridge’s Professor David Baulcombe’s keynote talk from the UK PlantSci 2013 meeting.