Ecosphere. Hampton and Labou investigated the employment figures for recent recipients of PhDs (degree awarded between 2000 and 2011) in ecology from US-based institutions. They found that less than 20% of the PhD recipients are in tenure-track positions at research-focused, PhD-granting universities.…

Plant Cell.  Li et al. studied epistatic (non-additive) interactions amongst the network of transcription factors controlling aliphatic glucosinolate biosynthetic pathways, which are well-described and have diverse roles in plant defense. Specifically, the authors measured metabolite levels and transcript…

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. The shoot apical meristem (SAM) is essential for the adaptation of aerial plant tissue architecture to changes in the environment. This paper by Landrein and colleagues connects changes in the plant environment (soil type, soil fertility, nitrate concentration) to changes…

Nature Comms. Phytochromes can exist in two states: an inactive state Pr and an active state Pfr. They convert into each other by light absorption. They can also revert to the inactive state by a light-independent thermal relaxation process called dark reversion. Phytochrome B is the primary receptor…

Nature news feature: The lost art of looking at plants Nature.  With the advent of advanced molecular techniques and tools, the detailed scrutiny of a plant’s physical attributes fell to the wayside. Focus has shifted from physiological characterization of a board range of species to detailed genomic…

By Catalin Voiniciuc, Markus Pauly, and Björn Usadel All plant cells are surrounded by complex walls that play a role in growth and differentiation of tissues. Walls provide mechanical integrity and structure to each cell, and represent an interface with neighboring cells and the environment (Somerville…

  About this Webinar: Research takes time—a lot of time. Once your manuscript is submitted, the reviewing process takes time—a lot of time. When your paper is finally published, you want it to be noticed by the scientific community – you want it to stand out and get noticed. One way…

Plants, Rumors and Imaging Spectroscopy Recorded February 2018    About this Webinar: Most supervised machine learning algorithms assume that each training data point is paired with an accurate training label (for classification) or value (for regression). However, obtaining accurate…