Nuclear accidents in recent years such as the Fukushima incident during the tsunami in 2011 revealed the detrimental effects of leaked radioactive cesium (Cs) in environmental soil and water. Due to Cs’s chemical similarity with potassium, an essential macronutrient for plants, cesium is taken up by potassium transporters even when it is present in small […]
DNA sequencing was slow before the development of high throughput sequencing. Portable DNA sequencing, which would make sequencing on-site a reality, was impossible until recently. Parker et al. report on the on-site use of MinION from Oxford Nanopore Technologies for DNA barcoding, which yields data within hours, showing “species identification could be conducted using genome […]
This week’s issue of What We’re Reading is guest edited by Arif Ashraf, a PhD student at Iwate University, Japan, and Graduate Student Ambassador of ASPB. His research interest is understanding the hormonal interplay in primary root development of Arabidopsis thaliana. He blogs about plant science at http://www.aribidopsis.com/. Arif is available in twitter (@aribidopsis) and […]
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 […]