Recent Posts

Funding Opportunity Announcement: USDA AFRI Releases RFA for Water for Food Production Systems Challenge Area Program

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On March 24, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) published a request for applications (RFA) for the AFRI Water for Food Production Systems Challenge Area, which is a combination of the Food Security and Water for Agriculture Challenge Areas.  This…

Update: Temporal dynamics of stomatal behaviour: modelling,and implications for photosynthesis and water use

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Stomata control gaseous exchange between the leaf and bulk atmosphere limiting CO2 uptake for photosynthesis and water loss by transpiration, and therefore determine plant productivity and water use efficiency. In order to function efficiently, stomata must respond to internal and external signals to…

Family Chores: TRAF-Family Proteins Help Recycle Cellular Rubbish by Regulating Autophagy Dynamics

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IN BRIEF by Jennifer Lockhart jlockhart@aspb.org Plant cell components that are no longer needed are degraded in the vacuole, but they don’t get there by magic. Sack-like double-membrane structures called autophagosomes engulf this cellular rubbish and neatly transport it to the vacuole for degradation.…

Are GMOs good or bad? From the video series "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell"

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Amazing - over 1.5 million views in less than 24 hours - this is a popular video series! Here is a list of sources from the YouTube page: SOURCES: #What is natural: GM insulin: http://bit.ly/2ncHaW5 Genetic engineering for thousands of years: http://bit.ly/2eCHKfi http://bit.ly/2mLCvPm CRISPR: http://bit.ly/2ncI2uN #…

Fighting World Hunger: Robotics Aid in the Study of Corn and Drought Tolerance

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Fighting World Hunger: Robotics Aid in the Study of Corn and Drought Tolerance from MU News Bureau on Vimeo. Developing drought tolerant corn that makes efficient use of available water is vital to sustain the estimated 9 billion global population by 2050. In March 2014, the National Science Foundation…

Shoot-to-root mobile polypeptides involved in systemic regulation of nitrogen acquisition ($)

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To balance nutrient uptake (usually from heterogeneous sources) with nutrient demand, plants use a root-shoot-root signaling pathway. Previously, a root-to-shoot mobile peptide C-TERMINALLY ENCODED PEPTIDE (CEP) was shown to translocate from N-starved roots to the shoot, where it interacts with a leucine-rich…

Changes in the chloroplastic CO2 concentration explain much of the observed Kok effect: a model ($)

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When the uptake of CO2 (A) is plotted against absorbed irradiance (I), at low I there is a noticeable bend that occurs around the light compensation point (I where CO2 release due to mitochondrial respiration is balanced by CO2 uptake by photosynthesis). When the slopes of both parts of the curve are…

TOPLESS mediates brassinosteroid control of shoot boundaries and root meristem development

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Steroids play a role as essential hormones in plants as well as in animals. In plants, steroids termed brassinosteroids (BR) regulate plant growth and development. BR has been shown to be involved in many processes such as light response, stomata and root development, and flowering in plants. BR-regulated…

Identification of Arabidopsis genic and non-genic promoters

A promoter is a region that “determines the position, direction, frequency, and timing of transcription”.  A cell can decode the sequence of the promoter to ensure appropriate transcription, but we still can’t. Tokizawa et al. performed a large-scale survey of promoters by sequencing regions upstream…