Undergraduate

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,"…

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…

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 #…

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…

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

One of the most important skills a young scientist needs to learn is how to read (and write) scientific papers. Some students begin to learn this in a high school biology classes, and others as they begin their university coursework. To help instructors teach these critical skills, we created two articles…

The Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) has developed numerous investigative activities using Arabidopsis. Most of the activities are suitable for high school or college level students. You can order seeds (usually free to educators) and download teaching guides from the Education and Outreach…

Instructions for activities using brassica, suitable for students of all ages. Through activities spanning the life cycle of Wisconsin Fast Plants®, you and your students can explore many aspects of plant growth and development and reproduction. In its 35 – 45 day life cycle, the Wisconsin Fast…

The other day I was talking to a friend about the need to demystify plants, so that teachers feel as confident in their teaching of plant biology as they do about animal biology. I wonder if sometimes we teach plants too much in isolation, so it’s not always clear how plants relate to other organisms…

We've assembled a collection of relatively accessible talks by scientists. These include: TED talks, which are directed at a general audience, the iBiology series, where speakers deliver a general talk followed by a research-focused talk, and videos of lectures at the Gatsby Plants summer school for…

Guest post by Rosanne Quinelle, an Associate Professor in the School of Life and Environmental Science at the University of Sydney, Australia. Proficiency in any discipline requires exposure to both breadth and depth, where “breadth” is akin to acquiring the vocabulary and “depth” is akin…

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,…

An introduction to wheat stem rust, a disease caused by the rust fungus Puccinia graminis, and efforts to breed resistant wheat varieties. View full article

PLOS Genetics Review article by Marijn Knip, Maria E. Constantin and Hans Thordal-Christense (2014). Knip M, Constantin ME, Thordal-Christensen H (2014) Trans-kingdom Cross-Talk: Small RNAs on the Move. PLoS Genet 10(9): e1004602. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1004602 View full article

Baulcombe, D.C. and Dean, C. (2014). Epigenetic Regulation in Plant Responses to the Environment. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology. 6:a019471. Comprehensive review article, open access, excellent overview of our understanding of epigenetic regulation in plants. Source: Cold Spring Harbor…

Overview of how Agrobacterium tumefaciens infects plants and causes disease. Published by APS. Crown gall by Kado, C.I. 2002. Crown gall. The Plant Health Instructor. DOI:10.1094/PHI-I-2002-1118-01 Excellent introducation to parastici plants. Nickrent, D.L. and Musselman, L.J. 2004. Introduction…

Overview of how Agrobacterium tumefaciens infects plants and causes disease. Published by APS. Crown gall by Kado, C.I. 2002. Crown gall. The Plant Health Instructor. DOI:10.1094/PHI-I-2002-1118-01 View resource

This special issues of New Phytologist is full of Open Access articles, reviews and commentaries about mycorrhizas and a good resource for students who want to learn more about this important topic. A Supplemental Resource for TTPB "Plants and their microsymbionts" View resource

An introduction to seven of the more serious biological threats to food security, including wheat stem rust, potato blight, black sigatoka, witchweed (Striga hermonthica), rice blast, Asian soybean rust, and cassava brown streak virus. View resource

Nice Open Access overview of auxin history and signaling, good for teaching. Enders, T.A. and Strader, L.C. (2015). Auxin activity: Past, present, and future. American Journal of Botany. 102: 180-196. "Long before its chemical identity was known, the phytohormone auxin was postulated to regulate plant…

This April 2014 Special Issue on Water is freely accessible and includes reviews on all aspects of plant water use from guard cells to cavitation. Great resource for teaching undergraduate or graduate plant physiology. View resource

A Supplement from Nature about how drought affects agriculture (Free Access). "Climate change means the coming decades are likely to bring more frequent episodes of severe drought, with potentially devastating impact on the world's ability to feed a growing population. We therefore need a sustainable…

California's current extreme drought must be a lesson for managing water in a warmer, more densely populated world, say Amir AghaKouchak and colleagues. View full article

In 1935, Japanese scientist Gonjoro Inazuka crossed a semi-dwarf Japanese wheat landrace with two American varieties resulting in an improved variety, known as Norin 10. Norin 10 derived varieties eventually ended up in the hands of Norman Borlaug, beginning one of the most extraordinary agricultural…

Useful article for Plant Nutrition lessons - how P use has changed over the past 400 years in China. "The biogeochemical cycle of phosphorus (P) has been massively altered in China, challenging its food security and causing eutrophication of freshwaters. This study shows, for the first time to our knowledge,…

Useful article for Plant Pathology lessons - an in-depth look at our current understanding of plant-pathogen interactions, including interviews from leaders in the field. "Just like animals, plants have to fight off pathogens looking for an unsuspecting cell to prey on. Unlike animals, however, plants…

The Geitmann Lab is here to help... Are you (or students) not quite sure what the term "cytomechanics" means? Or what beasts "pollen tubes" are? Use the Geitmann Lab Primers to get oriented to plant reproduction, pollen tubes and cytomechanics. Include plant lore in your celebrations of Valentine's…

An Open Access review article posted in the journal Genetics that provides an excellent overview of maize as a genetic and genomic system for study. Published March 2015, by Natalie J. Nannas and R. Kelly Dawe. View resource

Excellent set of educational resources from Learn.Genetics including activities and videos. The video "Epigenetics of Identical Twins" is an extremely clear explanations of epigenetics. View resource

Supplemental resources for TTPB "Plants and their microsymbionts" - Incredibly comprehensive web resource on the biology and study of mycorrhizal associations, © Mark Brundrett, CSIRO 2008. View resource

"Researchers from a dozen institutions recently completed a three-year effort to combine tens of thousands of trees into one diagram, most readable as a circle. The lines inside the circle represent all 2.3 million species that have been named. Biologists have genetic sequences for only about 5 percent…

This is a nice downloadable, printable fact-sheet from CIMMYT on Wheat Blast Disease that includes information on the key features of Wheat Blast, how to control it, where it is found in the world and its global significance, and a comprehensive references section for further reading. View resour…

Mysterious Mycorrhizae? A Field Trip & Classroom Experiment To Demystify the Symbioses Formed Between Plants & Fungi. Published in the American Biology Teacher VOLUME 71, NO. 7, SEPTEMBER 2009 p 424 - 429. NANCY C. JOHNSON, V. BALA CHAUDHARY, JASON D. HOEKSEMA, JOHN C. MOORE,ANNE PRINGLE, JAMES…

Published in the American Biology Teacher, 2014 by Tomomi Suwa and Brad Williamson. Guided inquiry into how rhizobia affect soybean growth. View resource

This protocol allows students to investigate the effects of the hormone auxin (Indole Acetic Acid or IAA) as a plant growth regulator, giving opportunities to look at auxiliary bud development, root development, and leaf abscission in Coleus. The method is suitable for independent investigations by students.…

The APS Education Center includes peer-reviewed publications, which constitute the online journal, The Plant Health Instructor, as well as additional resources for plant pathology education. Resources for a broad range of educational activities are available, including outreach to K-12 teachers, materials…

Videos are excellent ways to communicate about plant science. They can stimulate curiosity, explain a complicated idea, or make the invisible visible. Here is a curated list of some of our favorite short plant science videos. Crash Course Biology: Plant Cells (10 min), Photosynthesis (13 min), The…