Filmed at the Long Now Foundation, March 2016. Revolutionary rice Feeding the world (and saving nature) in this populous century, Jane Langdale began, depends entirely on agricultural efficiency—the ability to turn a given amount of land and sunlight into ever more food. And that depends on three forms of efficiency in each crop plant: 1) […]
Science In Real Life (IRL) is an educational YouTube series that’s here to show you how textbook science concepts come to life in the lab. Since each episode revolves around an experiment that a scientist does every day in the lab or field, our viewers also get to see what being a scientist is like, […]
Images for Impact Recorded October 2016 Download a handout with links and other information here. About this Webinar: Whether you’re Tweeting or teaching, well-designed images increase the impact of your message. It’s easy to make high-quality images for use in science communication (whether social media, blogs, infographics, animations, teaching or research) simply using tools available […]
Frédéric Bouché, a postdoctoral research with Richard Amasino at the University of Wisconsin, recently caught our attention when he published a set of impressive visual abstracts to support his latest research papers. We invited him to share how and why he makes these images. -Editors When you work hard, and your scientific work is finally […]
Eucalypts are fast-growing trees increasingly exploited for pulp, paper, bioenergy and other wood-based products. Using genetics tools and a network-based data integration (NBDI) approach, Mizrachi et al. explore a segregating Eucalyptus hybrid population for genes and pathways underlying biomass / bioenergy traits. Their analysis produced an expression QTL (eQTL) map and molecular networks associated with […]
One of the many ways that Xanthomonas bacteria manipulate their host plants is by the production of transcription activator-like (TAL) effectors, which the bacterium introduces into the host cell where they alter gene expression in the host nucleus. Schwartz et al. investigated the targets of the TAL effector AvrHah1 produced by the pathogen Xanthomonas gardneri […]
Root-knot nematodes including Meloidogyne javanica are major agricultural pests. Previous studies have shown that biocontrol agents including species of the fungal genus Trichoderma interfere with root-knot nematode pathogenicity, directly through effects on the nematode, and indirectly through a stimulation of plant defenses (priming). Medeiros et al. investigated the mechanism of priming by Trichoderma atroviride, using […]
One of the big challenges of working with wheat, as compared to rice, is that the wheat we eat is polyploid; bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) is hexaploid (six copies of each gene) and pasta wheat (Triticum turgidum) is tetraploid (four copies each). Polyploidy makes forward genetics difficult; knocking out one gene rarely leads to phenotypic […]
Where do flowers come from? Their sudden appearance and rapid radiation was described as an “abominable mystery” by Charles Darwin. Ruelens et al. examine the genetic toolkit that underpins reproductive organ formation in gymnosperms to uncover the origins of flowers (which they pragmatically describe as “an assembly of protective, attractive and reproductive male and female […]