via iPhylo “The Plant List () has been released today, complete with glowing press releases. The list includes some 1,040,426 names. I eagerly looked for the Download button, but none is to be found. You can grab...
Category - News
AJ Cann
January Sales open on English forests
Via Tom Goskar comes news that the UK government has announced the next plan to reduce the deficit. It is to sell the English forests. Every single state-owned tree is for sale, around 18% of the forests in England...
Alun Salt
See like a bee
Though bees can see colour, they perceive the world differently from us. Unlike humans, bees have evolved a different color recognition system which allows them to see colours in the ultra-violet range. New research...
Global Crop Diversity Trust to store wild relatives of food crops
The BBC reports on a plan to collect and store the wild plant relatives of essential food crops, including wheat, rice, and potatoes by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. There is a link over to the right of the page to...
Orbis non Sufficit
A lot of light and not much heat came from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences Study Week on ‘Transgenic Plants for Food Security in the Context of Development’ held in the Vatican earlier this year. The summary of...
Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison
Bad Times Just Around The Corner
… for Plant Sciences at Imperial College London, according to a post on the Imperial College Union website: Out of the two affected sections (Plant & Microbial Sciences and Cell Biology & Functional...
Beer IS good for you! [or Antibiotics: good for what ale’s you]
Famously, stories abound that certain sportsmen have had their beer drinking endorsed by medical professionals () as a form of medicine. Apocryphal (a euphemism for ‘probably not true’) as those modern tales may be, a...
Nigel Chaffey
Improving your image
Image: Lothar Schermelleh, Wikimedia Commons (adapted from Schermelleh et al., Science 320: 1332–1336). Gene sequences are all very well. But even the most committed of gene-genies/gel-jockies will usually admit that...
Silencing of tandem transgenes in potato
Silencing of tandem transgenes in potato Transgene expression stability is a critical point in applications of transgenic plants. Nocarova et al. study long-term changes in transgene expression in potato, Solanum...
botanyone
Wood-destroyer sequenced
Image: Gerhard Schuster, Wikimedia Commons. In a beautifully understated opening sentence – worthy of Watson and Crick’s famous 1953 seminal paper describing the structure of DNA – Robin Ohmi et al. (Nature...
Invasion strategies in clonal aquatic plants
Invasion strategies in clonal aquatic plants The successful spread of invasive plants is often linked to a diverse gene pool that facilitates local adaptation to variable environmental conditions: but what about clonal...
Modelling root development with signalling control (PMA Special Issue)
Modelling root development with signalling control There are two major challenges for using functional–structural modelling to study autoregulation of nodulation: reconstruction of legume root architecture and co...
AM fungi and poplar growth on contaminated soil
AM fungi and poplar growth on contaminated soil Plant tolerance to stress can be improved by the presence of mycorrhiza. Cicatelli et al. study the response of poplar, Populus alba, with or without pre-inoculation with...
Lucky heather? No, clover!
Swift – Image: Paweł Kuźniar, Wikimedia Commons. Work by Rebecca Tashiro et al. (Crop Science 50: 1260–1268, 2010), which identifies a gene that converts 3-leaved white clover (Trifolium repens) into 4-leafed...
