Recent Posts

Fighting Fusarium wilt to beat the bananapocalypse

 Dr. Sarah Schmidt (@BananarootsBlog), Researcher and Science Communicator at The Sainsbury Laboratory Science. Sarah got hooked on both banana research and science writing when she joined a banana Fusarium wilt field trip in Indonesia as a Fusarium expert. She began blogging at https://bananaroots.wordpress.com and…

Chinese plant science and Journal of Experimental Botany

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This week’s post was written by Jonathan Ingram, Senior Commissioning Editor / Science Writer for the Journal of Experimental Botany. Jonathan moved from lab research into publishing and communications with the launch of Trends in Plant Science in 1995, then going on to New Phytologist and, in…

A Taste of CRISPR

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This week’s blog was written by Dr Craig Cormick, the Creative Director of ThinkOutsideThe. He is one of Australia’s leading science communicators, with over 30 years’ experience working with agencies such as CSIRO, Questacon and Federal Government Departments.   So what do you think…

Broadcasting Plant Science Live to the World

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This week’s post was written by Dr Ian Street (@IHStreet), the Resources Editor at AoB Blog. He is also a science writer and plant scientist. His science blog is The Quiet Branches. On 18th May 2017, plant scientists from all over the world celebrated “International Fascination of Plants Day”.…

The Global Plant Council visits the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility

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This post is republished with the kind permission of the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility (APPF).  We at the APPF love visits from our global plant science community, so it was a treat to host Ruth Bastow, Executive Director of the Global Plant Council (GPC), this week. While she was…

Striga hermonthica – a beautiful but devastating plant…

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This week’s post was written by Caroline Wood, a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. When it comes to crop diseases, insects, viruses, and fungi may get the media limelight but in certain regions it is actually other plants which are a farmer’s greatest enemy. In sub-Saharan Africa,…

Student-driven plant breeding symposium addresses global challenges in the 21st century

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This week we spoke to Francisco Gomez and Ammani Kyanam, graduate students in the Soil and Crop Science Department at Texas A&M University, USA. They were part of the organizing committee for the recent Texas A&M Plant Breeding Symposium, a successful meeting run entirely by students at the University.   Could…

Just add water: Could resurrection plants help feed the world?

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This week we spoke to Professor Henk Hilhorst (Wageningen University and Research) about his research on desiccation tolerance in seeds and plants.   Could you begin by telling us a little about your research? I am a plant physiologist specializing in seed biology. I have a long research…