Entries by Mary Williams

Special Issue: Legumes – From Food Security to Climate Change

The April issue of J. Exp. Bot is a special issue on Legumes. The Editorial introduction, by Considine et al. (10.1093/jxb/erx099) observes that grain legumes “will form a cornerstone of future food and nutritional security and a global web of biodiversity.” Issue articles span topics including genomics resources and breeding tools, climate resiliency, interactions with […]

What We’re Reading: May 19th

Special Issue: Legumes – From Food Security to Climate Change The April issue of J. Exp. Bot is a special issue on Legumes. The Editorial introduction, by Considine et al. (10.1093/jxb/erx099) observes that grain legumes “will form a cornerstone of future food and nutritional security and a global web of biodiversity.” Issue articles span topics […]

Australia’s giant parasitic Christmas tree, with blades sharp enough to cut telephone wire

Here’s a fascinating plant in honor of Fascination of Plants Day #PlantDay By Tim Low, published in Australian Geographic AUSTRALIA HAS A PARASITE believed to be the largest in the world, a tree whose greedy roots stab victims up to 110m away. The Christmas tree (Nuytsia floribunda) has blades for slicing into the roots of […]

Ten simple rules to make the most out of your undergraduate research career

Undergraduate research is a transformative experience for many early-career scientists, allowing them to experience the joys and pains of research first hand. Yu and Kuo offer some straightforward advice to help students gain the most from this opportunity. While some of the advice is directed towards computational biology students, most is broadly applicable (as in […]

Transcriptome analysis illuminates the nature of the intracellular interaction in a vertebrate-algal symbiosis

Chloroplasts are of course the descendants of ancient endosymbiotic cyanobacteria. While there are examples of photosynthetic bacteria or algae living in animal tissues (e.g., anemones and corals), vertebrate endosymbiosis is rare. One exception is the interaction between a salamander Ambystoma maculatum and the green alga Oophila amblystomatis, which lives on and within the salamander’s eggs […]

Hybridizing transgenic Bt cotton with non-Bt cotton counters resistance in pink bollworm

Biotic interactions are complex; any effort by the prey/host to defend against the predator/pathogen provides selective pressure towards overcoming those defenses. As new herbivore control methods are developed they quickly lose effectiveness as the pests evolve resistance; this is true whether the control method is sprayed externally or produced internally as it is in transgenic […]

An animal-like cryptochrome controls the Chlamydomonas sexual cycle ($)

Light controls many aspects of the lifecycle of photosynthetic organisms, including the green alga Chlamydomonas. Cryptochromes are a family of photoreceptors, of which there are four members in Chlamydomonas. One of these is known as the animal-type cryptochrome, aCRY. To investigate the function of aCRY, Zou et al. generated insertional mutants in aCRY that knocked […]

Root hydrotropism is controlled via a cortex-specific growth mechanism ($)

Hydrotropism is the curvature of a plant root towards water. Previous work showed that the hormone abscisic acid (ABA), but not the auxin transporters AUX1 and PIN, is required for hydrotropism, demonstrating that the mechanisms of hydrotropism and gravitropism are distinct. Previous work also showed that MIZU-KUSSEI1 (MIZ1), a gene of unknown function, is required […]