Recent Posts

Perception and reading strategies of scientific papers depends on academic career stage

PLOS One. Katharine Hubbard (@KEHplantsci) and Sonja Dunbar (@PlantSciSonja) are enthusiastic proponents of student-centered teaching, including guiding undergraduate students through the reading of scientific papers. In this new work they’ve evaluated how  undergraduate students compare to graduate…

Next Generation of Training for Arabidopsis Researchers: Bioinformatics and Quantitative Biology

In a new Commentary in Plant Physiology, Friesner et al. write a compelling vision for next-generation training for plant scientists. We asked three of the 39 authors, Joanna Friesner, Molly Megrew and Siobhan Brady, to tell us about their motivations and goals for writing this commentary. You…

Barriers to integration of bioinformatics into undergraduate life sciences education

Today’s biology students need to be trained to work with large datasets, meaning that mathematics, statistics and computer science should regularly be integrated into their biology courses. Williams et al. carried out a survey to determine the extent to which this occurs. Although 95% of respondents…

New Teaching Tool: Root Phenomics

Meet the newest member of the Teaching Tools in Plant Biology family, Phenomics of root system architecture: Measuring and analyzing root phenes -By Larry York and Guillaume Lobet. This teaching tool discusses the relatively young field of root system architecture quantification. It introduces the concepts…

Celebrating women in STEM through @365womeninSTEM

/
From abstract algebra to zoology, women participate in science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM), but sometimes their stories are not as well known as those of their male colleagues. To remedy this, PhD student Josie Maidment is conducting a one-year Twitter education campaign called "@365womeninSTEM,"…

How to make a DNA Bracelet

/
Cross-posted from Kelsey Wood with permission. Kelsey is a PhD student at U.C. Davis. How to make a DNA bracelet, from any organism and any gene! I study plant-pathogen interactions, so I chose to make a sequence from a wild tobacco gene that is important for plant defense against pathogens. What…

Are GMOs good or bad? From the video series "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell"

/
Amazing - over 1.5 million views in less than 24 hours - this is a popular video series! Here is a list of sources from the YouTube page: SOURCES: #What is natural: GM insulin: http://bit.ly/2ncHaW5 Genetic engineering for thousands of years: http://bit.ly/2eCHKfi http://bit.ly/2mLCvPm CRISPR: http://bit.ly/2ncI2uN #…

Experiments on Plant Hybrids by Gregor Mendel (new English translation)

/
Scott Abbott and View ORCID ProfileDaniel J. Fairbanks Genetics October 1, 2016 vol. 204 no. 2 407-422; https://doi.org/10.1534/genetics.116.195198 Reprinted here under CC-BY permission. Available in PDF form here. Here, translated into English, GENETICS republishes…

Plant evolution and diversity word search

/
Botanical terms can seem obscure. Why not help your students master some terminology through a word search puzzle? Download it here: http://aspb.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Plant-Evolution-SearchaWord.pdf