This is a re-post of a piece I wrote for the All Under One Leaf, the blog of the UK Plant Science Federation in August 2016. It is reposted here with permission. A flowering world There are around 369,000 known flowering plant species on Earth today, by far the most numerous group of plants living … More How Does a Flower Come to be?
Why Genomes? Genome sequencing is routine now. Sequencing the A–T, C–G order of base pairs has gotten a lot cheaper and pipelines of software to do it have gotten better too. However, that doesn’t make it any less important. Before the era of physical (as in the actual basepair sequence structure), geneticists relied on maps … More Plant Genomes of 2016.
I had the pleasure of attending Sci Comm Camp in Malibu, CA organized by Sarah Keartes, Cara Santa Maria, and Jason Goldman. There is much more to say, but this post tries to weave together the messages I took away from the experience, plus some pictures, tweets, and hopefully, some substantive answers as to what … More Take Aways From Sci Comm Camp
Picture a flower now, in your head. What do you see? Say it out loud even, or describe it in your mind (or in the comments below before reading on- honor system, I trust you). Picture a flower now, in your head. What do you see? Say it out loud even, or describe it in … More An Alien Flower?
Go for the sun. It’s a prime directive for most plants on Earth. Gather enough light to drive carbon dioxide, an atmospheric gas, into sugars to fuel growth. The rest of the needed ingredients to build a plant come from underground and the roots. To build more roots, however, photosynthesis has to happen. Go for … More Reach For The Sun.
Cells are the units that make up life. Multi-cellular organisms like humans or plants can be millions or trillions of cells. Most cells are also specialized in function. Skin cells look and do very different things from a brain neuron. A leaf cell is much different than a root cell. Specialized (i.e. differentiated) cells started … More How (plant) cells know who they are.
Plants have roots. And a new way of imaging them was recently published in eLife. It’s called GLO-roots and is a way to monitor roots growing in soil as well as track gene expression in those roots via glowing reporters detectable by a very sensitive imaging camera. The story of GLO-roots is clever and new, … More Roots of Modern Plant Biology.
Being multi-cellular has advantages. Specialization of cells for different jobs is one advantage– akin to humans adopting agriculture, freeing up some of us to do other things. Multi-cellularity is also quite challenging as those cells have to communicate well together and there are more cells to feed/keep healthy. Different cells have to be able to … More Guardians of Gas Exchange.
The Quiet Branches 