Recent Posts

Review: Endosperm and Imprinting

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"The endosperm is often viewed as a complicated and rather strange tissue" begins this review by Gehring and Satyaki. They go on to describe that the endosperm is the site of expression of imprinted genes, which are genes that are expressed soley when inherited from the mother or father.  The authors…

Biofortification of plants: New Reviews ($)

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Biofortification is the nutritional enhancement (using conventional or genetic engineering approaches) of food with vitamins or micronutrients with the goal of improving the human diet. A set of new reviews in Current Opinion in Biotechnology summarizes progress towards biofortification of plants to…

Review: Plasmodesmata, pores between cells ($)

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The cytosol of most plant cells are connected by plasmodesmata, tiny channels that form bridges between adjoining cells (guard cells notably lack plasmodesmatal connections). Water, ions, small molecules, proteins and viruses can move through plasmodesmata. Upon wounding or infection, plasmodesmatal…

NSF - NIFA Plant Biotic Interactions Program (PBI)

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The Plant Biotic Interactions (PBI) program supports research on the processes that mediate beneficial and antagonistic interactions between plants and their viral, bacterial, oomycete, fungal, plant, and invertebrate symbionts, pathogens and pests. This joint NSF-NIFA program supports projects focused…

Research Awards and Fellowships at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University

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The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University promotes and supports research consistent with its mission to discover and disseminate knowledge of the plant kingdom. To foster both independent and collaborative work, the Arboretum offers fellowships and awards to students, post-doctoral researchers, and…

Plant Feedstocks Genomics for Bioenergy: A Joint Research Funding Opportunity Announcement USDA, DOE

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The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research (BER), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), hereby announce their interest in receiving applications for genomicsbased research that will lead to the improved…

Pushing back the dawn of life

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Our understandings of the forces that have shaped Earth and the forces that have shaped life on Earth have common roots. Charles Darwin was famously inspired by the work of early geologists such as Charles Lyell, who proposed that Earth was subject to slow but gradual change. This idea recurs in Darwin’s…

GARNet2016 CRISPR/Cas workshop presentation

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Slides from the recent CRISPR/Cas workshop held at the GARNet2016 meeting are now available to download. Organized by Vladimir Nekrasov and Amanda Hopes (The Sainsbury Laboratory/University of East Anglia, UK), the workshop title was, "Introduction to CRISPR-Cas, troubleshooting target design…

Did a Swedish researcher eat the first CRISPR meal ever served?

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From Science, By Jon Cohen Sep. 7, 2016 http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/did-swedish-researcher-eat-first-crispr-meal-ever-served In what Swedish plant scientist Stefan Jansson declares “maybe” a historic event, he cultivated, grew, and ate a plant that had its genome edited with CRISPR-Cas9.…