Category: Blog

The decrease in food security for students is a troublingly common problem on university campuses. Guest post by Sterling Field I often frame my research on plant adaptation to flooding in terms of the need for food security in a changing climate. While this is a great way to start a conversation…

By Amna Mhamdi and Charlotte M.M. Gommers The nuclear genome encodes the majority of chloroplast-localized proteins and, in return, chloroplasts exert some control over nuclear gene expression via so-called retrograde signals. These signals derive from developing chloroplasts (referred to as biogenic…

We think of enzymes as highly specific catalysts that carry out one reaction and show nearly absolute substrate specificity. However, absolute specificity is the exception, not the rule, as most enzymes accept several structurally similar substrates. Moreover, many enzymes catalyze alternative reactions…

Most of the carbon dioxide sequestered by plants during photosynthesis is converted into sugars and stored into polysaccharide-enriched cells walls that constitute the majority of the plant biomass. While plants have long been considered a valuable resource of biomaterials for the chemical and textile…

About the Inclusivity in the Plant Sciences Workshop This past January, a group of diverse and passionate individuals from across the field of plant sciences convened at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute campus in Chevy Chase, MD to participate in the Inclusivity in the Plant Sciences strategic…

About you Describe your journey from student to newly appointed faculty   I grew up in country side during my childhood and schooling. I graduated from University of Pune, India with a degree in Biochemistry. I then moved to Japan and started my PhD with D. Setsuyuki Aoki at Nagoya University,…

At first thought, dealing with alternative splicing with RNA-seq might appear simple. In the simplest situations, you could have a couple of different transcripts, and it is simple to work out if any increase from the reads mapping uniquely to each transcript (Figure 1). Figure 1 - Blue boxes are constitutive…

A series by Alyssa Preiser Why did you decide to pursue science as you went through college, and what got you particularly interested in epigenetics and plant developmental transitions? I loved the documentaries of the marine biologist Jacques Cousteau so I chose to study marine biology at…