Archive: February, 2018

The inaugural class of ASPB Conviron Scholars are wrapping up their virtual course, which included discussions and exercises on various aspects of professional development, from communication to leadership. As part of the course, they were asked to write a blog post and do some sort of independent…

Cataloguing of American plants started in the year 1526 with the chronicles by Fernandez de Oviedo that already included the first reports of now widely use crops such as chili pepper and corn. Ulloa-Ulloa et al. present in this article a complete and searchable checklist (large PDF) of all known American…

Apple  (Malus spp.) is an economically important tree that faces, like other crops cultured in temperate regions, remarkable challenges due to climate change such as abiotic (drought and salinity) and biotic (fungi, bacteria and aphids) stresses. For that, there is increasing need to preserve Malus…

The global demand for cocoa (from Theobroma cacao) has been increasing, but production has not kept up with demand due to global climate change, pest and disease issues, and low productivity due to old cocoa trees. Currently, grafting and seeds (produced by cross-pollination) are used to propagate cocoa,…

For decades, the Gnetophyte lineage has puzzled plant scientists in its correct phylogenetic placement. When taxonomists largely focused on morphological characteristics before the advent of molecular biology, it made sense to treat these apparently intermediate species as a transitional group between…

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is today the main model to study fleshy fruit development. Until now, most tomato growth and ripening studies are focused on a single tissue, the pericarp, and do not take into consideration the development of internal tissues. Shinozaki et al. provide an extensive spatiotemporal…

During 2017, a consortium of 200 German research institutions was in conversations with the publishing group Elsevier to achieve a collective deal for full online access to Elsevier journals. This deal would have granted them access to about 2.500 journals for half the market price.  After they could…

Embryogenesis is the simple process of plant development, but until recently our knowledge has been limited to how individual cells are specified and organized. Reported markers have been mostly constitutive promoter-driven, a fact that creates background and makes them unsuitable for the study of cellular…