Recent Posts

Should you go to grad school? (From Science Careers)

Really useful post about whether or not graduate school is right for you. "If you’re unsure about whether you should pursue a Ph.D., taking some time away from academia to explore your career interests and professional goals can help crystallize whether further training makes sense. For chemical…

How socio-cultural factors influence publication practices in China

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By Sneha Kulkarni.  This post How socio-cultural factors influence publication practices in China was originally published on Editage Insights. The recent mass retraction case in which the journal Tumor Biology retracted about 107 papers authored by Chinese researchers sparked discussions about several…

Plant Cell Editorial: Journal Impact, Brave New World

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Latest news on The Plant Cell significance and editorial policies "Larivière et al. (2016) advocate publishing frequency distribution plots of the citations to provide a clearer view of the underlying data. We agree that showing the underlying frequency distribution of citations “echoes the reasonable…

So Much Data, So Little Time: ePlant Steps into the Breach for Plant Researchers

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The ever-increasing amount of data available to researchers has come with similarly increasing cognitive loads in efforts to use these data. Even when data sets are stored in well-curated databases, it can be time-consuming to master the specific tools harbored at each site and cumbersome to move between…

An Emerging Model Diatom to Study Nitrogen Metabolism

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Carbon and nitrogen metabolism are intricately linked in all organisms and are tightly regulated to maintain growth, homeostasis, and other cellular activities. In plants and algae, photosynthesis provides both carbon skeletons and the reductant needed for assimilation of inorganic NO3¯ by nitrate reductase…

Review: Plant phenomics, from sensors to knowledge

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Tardieu et al. have written a comprehensive and very readable overview of the current state and future challenges of plant phenomics, which they define as “the development and application of the suite of tools and methods used for three major goals — (1) capturing information on structure, function…

Medicine is not health care, food is health care: Plant metabolic engineering, diet and human health

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A diet consisting of a wide range of plant matter is optimal for human heath, but due to various historical and social factors (including the relatively high cost of fresh fruit and vegetables), many people don’t get the nutrients they need. Biofortification of staple foods like rice through breeding…

Identification of novel growth regulators in plant populations expressing random peptides

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Knowing that many small molecules act as growth regulators, chemical genomics endeavors to identify novel growth-regulating compounds through screening thousands of randomly generated molecules. Knowing that many peptides also act as growth regulators, Bao et al. used a similar approach to look for novel…

Cis and trans determinants of epigenetic silencing by Polycomb repressive complex 2 ($)

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Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2) stably regulates gene expression by initiating repressive histone methylation (specifically,  trimethylation of histone H3 at Lys27, H3K27me3). Xiao et al. investigated how PRC2 targets the genes it silences. They identified several Polycomb response elements (PREs)…