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...
Category - News
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...
AJ Cann
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...
Floral form and ontogeny of Annonaceae
Floral form and ontogeny of Annonaceae Annonaceae are a remarkably diverse family of Magnoliales. Xu and Ronse De Craene investigate the floral development of 15 species using SEM to understand the basis for...
Chromosome region for high hydraulic conductance in rice
Chromosome region for high hydraulic conductance in rice The rate of photosynthesis in paddy rice, Oryza sativa, often decreases around noon on sunny days because of water stress even under submerged conditions. Adachi...
Hybrids: A dead end or the future?
Chromosomes in a hybrid Crocus The New York Times has an informative and thoughtful article by Sean Carroll about interspecific hybrids this week. The article starts with photographs of a range of remarkable animal...
