Tag: Research Methods and Tools

Maintaining nutrient homeostasis is ridiculously challenging, in large part due to the tremendous effects individual nutrients have on other nutrients’ uptake and action, as well as the interactions between nutrient homeostasis and environmental conditions. In order to maintain the “right” amount…

How to be an effective mentor Recorded July 25, 2019  About This Webinar Being an effective mentor involves making yourself available to support and advise someone when they need it, delivering that support in a way that makes sense to them, and always keeping that person's best interests in…

The world demands food, plant scientists and breeders have the challenge of feeding a growing population. In a recent review Hickey et al. summarize the state-of-the-art technologies used for crop improvement. In use since 2003, ‘speed breeding’ is a set of improved methods for fast-tracking plant…

Addressing fundamental questions in plant science through synthetic biology Recorded July 10, 2019  About This Webinar In this seminar, we examined the role that synthetic biology can play in answering fundamental questions in plant science. In studying plants for the past hundred years, we’ve…

Revolutions in omics technologies have rapidly increased the number of plant genomes, transcriptomes and proteomes available. However, protein sequences need to be assigned a biological function to provide useful insights for comparative genomics and transcriptomics. Here, Schwacke et al present MapMan4,…

Pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) proteins bind RNA, using a code in which specific amino acid motifs recognize specific bases, similar to TAL effector proteins. In plants, PPR proteins localize almost exclusively to mitochondria and chloroplasts, with functions including RNA, stabilization, splicing and…

In this preprint Kim et al., have provided an optimized method for determining protein-protein interaction in plants using TurboID-mediated labelling.  TurboID is an engineered promiscuous biotin ligase that marks proteins it comes in contact with. Identification of interacting partners of a protein…

Drop-Seq is an exciting high-throughput technology for single cell transcriptomics. Using microfluidics, single cells are encapsulated in drops with beads carrying “bar-coded” primers. The RNA from each individual cell is labeled with a unique primer code, then sequenced. Now, Shulse et al. have…