If you’re a plant scientist in the UK or EU (or a scientist of any kind), please do use the comments section below to talk about what Brexit might mean for you and your career. This post can serve as a repository of accounts about how policies impact STEM and vice-versa. Though the precise nature … More Brexit, Science policy, and Unintended Consequences of Trading Lemons.
161 Years Ago In the centuries old St. Thomas Abbey– in the garden and greenhouse– Gregor Mendel tended, crossed, and tracked some 10,000 pea plants (Pisum sativum) through several generations over 7 years. The greenhouse was warm compared to the monastery where his chambers were. The monastery was constantly damp and cool, originally built as … More 150 Years After Mendel Published His Foray Into Life Science.
This post was also posted on the SciLogs version of The Quiet Branches. Two reports released in the last month talk about the state of plants. One was the more narrowly focused National Academies report on GE crops,Genetically Engineered Crops: Experiences and Prospects (@NASciences_Ag, #GECropStudy; 1,420 hits on Google in the past month, 92 on … More Plants Matter. Two Reports Highlight Their State– and Ours.
One of my favorite podcasts is Flash Forward, created (& hosted) by Rose Eveleth. She explores a potential future and then comes back to the present to discuss how plausible it is and the implications of a future like that, and just what that future says about our present world. So with that in mind, … More Chez GMO
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.
This is a book review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s “The Signature of All Things”. There are many spoilers herein. so if you care about that kind of thing, stop reading early on. If you’ve read this book, do let me know what your impressions were. Botany for economic gain, natural curiosity, and artisanal botany popular in … More The Signature of All Things.
Flowering Flowering is a killer application of the natural world. There are 300,000 extant species of flowering plants, dwarfing any other type of plant. There are only several thousand species of other types of plants (about 15,000 mosses exist today– the next most abundant group of plants). To say flowers are an evolutionary success story … More Flowering time and genetic memory.
This week, I’m taking a break from the cutting edge science and am going to talk about getting outside to walk in a natural, green setting. The Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, VT has a network of trails with some outdoor exhibits, including the planet walk. Starting from The Sun, the planets are laid out … More Nature walk.
Do you ever wonder about how a plant goes from seed to whole plant? The flip answer is ‘it grows’. But how? How is a plant organized to generate shoots, leaves, roots, flowers, etc.? A scientist that studied that question passed away recently. His name: Ian Sussex. One of his former postdocs and a great … More Ian Sussex and Plant Meristems
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