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 engineer Ian Faulkner, for example, a year and […]
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 aspects of academic publishing – the culture in academia, the standards upheld by […]
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 requests that journal reviewers and editors make of authors to show […]
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 and performance of large numbers of plants, […]
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 or genetic engineering provides one strategy […]
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 growth regulating peptides. The expressed small peptides of random sequence (potentially […]
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) that are binding sites for transcription factors which interact with PRC2. When selected PREs were […]
A plant’s life begins with the fusion of haploid egg and sperm cells to produce a diploid zygote. Many of the processes that control early development are under the control of the maternal genome, but at some point there is a shift towards zygotic control. Chen et al. investigated when this shift occurs through transcriptomic […]
Many plants are not simple diploids (two copies of each chromosome) but are instead are the result of various forms of polyploidization (for example, whole-genome duplication or interspecific hybridization). Polyploidization can disrupt well-established controls over gene expression levels, transposon silencing and other epigenetic processes. Previous studies have indicated that one of the two geneomes (known […]