Recent Posts

Commentary: Salt Tolerance in Crops: Not Only a Matter of Gene Regulation

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By Elide Formentin Rice (Oryza sativa), the primary source of calories for more than 2 billion people, is the most sensitive of all cereal crops to soil salinity, which affects more than 20% of irrigated arable land (FAO and ITPS, 2015). Rice paddies are mainly located at the delta of rivers, where…

Letter to the Editor: Does C4 Photosynthesis Occur in Wheat Seeds?

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By Robert J. Henry, Parimalan Rangan, Agnelo Furtado, Florian A. Busch, Graham D. Farquhar Does C4 photosynthesis occur in seeds? A nice set of of arguments for and against, as Letters to Editor. Read more ... http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/174/4/1992

My experiences as a PlantingScience mentor

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PlantingScience is an online mentoring program that virtually connects scientists with junior high or high school students as they participate in inquiry-based activities with plants. Mentors commit to an hour or so per week over roughly two to four weeks, during which they respond to student questions…

Plant blindness and the implications for plant conservation

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Plant Blindness negatively affects plant conservation, despite plants being a majority on the endangered species list. Balding and Williams review the research on plant blindness and argue that it isn’t inevitable. There are cultures in the world more keenly aware of plants than most in western societies…

High throughput phenotyping to accelerate crop breeding and monitoring of diseases in the field ($)

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High throughput phenotyping (HTP) is a frontier in plant biology. Shakoor et al. review the state of HTP and various levels of implementation, current limitations, and the new horizons for the field. Envirotyping – getting all the information possible from an individual plant in a field to fully understand…

Redefine statistical significance

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With data generation, high false positive rates, and inability to reproduce findings all on the rise in science, Benjamin et al. propose lowering the standard threshold of the p-value to 0.005. The p < 0.05 standard would be termed “suggestive” under this scheme. Some of the caveats are that this…

7000 botanists together at the 6-yearly Congress #IBC2017

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The International Botanical Congress was held in Shenzhen, China (#IBC2017) last week. The AoB Blog published several blog posts and tweet collections from the conference. The Congress also voted on The Shenzhen Declaration on Plant Science designed to unite plant scientists around several priorities…

MEICA1 (meiotic chromosome association1) interacts with TOP3α and regulates meiotic recombination in rice

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Hu et al. found a sterile rice mutant defective in meiosis. They mapped it to MEICA1, a widely conserved but uncharacterized protein required to ensure crossovers occur between allelic regions of chromosomes. It also inhibits allelic homologous recombination. This adds to a suite of proteins eukaryotic…

NLR locus-mediated trade-off between abiotic and biotic stress adaptation in Arabidopsis ($)

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With both biotic and abiotic stresses predicted to worsen due to climate change, the ideal crop of the future must have traits to handle both. Common abiotic stresses like drought, cold, and salinity cause osmotic stress by disrupting cell turgor. Exposure to a mild salt treatment leads some plants to…