Say you write something and submit it for editing. Your editor sends it back with comments. And you create a new version and re-submit and so on. it’s a feedback loop. With editor/writer, it’s a loop of iterative improvement resulting in something publishable (ideally). Feedback loops in biology are also quite common. A recent paper … More Small surprises and a new feedback loop.
What to make of Junk DNA A few weeks ago, science writer Carl Zimmer wrote (and literally bled in T. Ryan Gregory’s lab) a column in the New York Times exploring “junk” DNA. It’s a really good piece that also hits on how scientists have been arguing for a long time about what’s adaptive, what’s random, … More A small plant genome and “junk” DNA.
Einstein’s theories of relativity enables out modern global positioning system (GPS) to work because the satellites have to correct for the distances between the satellites and Earth. This was not the intent when Einstein derived the mathematics of the relativistic universe. At least I don’t think it was. He was playing around with figuring out how … More From nature to product.
Before getting into this week’s post, I’d like to remind my readers that the discoveries of plant science I talk about here are going on in plants everywhere. The details may vary and the specific output responses might be different, but the research plant scientists do translates to most plants. The processes that go on … More My greatest moment in plant science.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about auxin. And how auxin signaling works. As promised in my last post, I’m going to tell the story of identifying the auxin receptor and a recent development in the story. Background. Ascribing a function to genes (a single unit of the multi-gene/genome DNA blueprint of an organism) is … More The Auxin Receptor(s).
Cytokinins: Part 2. Last week, I told the story about how cytokinins as a factor that induced cell division and new shoot formation. The first in the class of molecules was the adenine derivative Kinetin. Kinetin is a synthetic molecule, or the product of rearranging natural ones when DNA sits out for many months. Carlos … More Cytokinins, Part 2.
It’s hormone month at The Quiet Branches. It makes a little sense now that I think about it. Love is supposedly in the air with Valentine’s Day and the plants that go dormant for winter will soon be back, engaging their hormone pathways to sprout new growth. In a way, I hope I’m teaching you … More Plant Hormones: Ethylene
Here is a list of small molecule (chemical) signals used by most/all plants: Auxin Cytokinin Ethylene Abscisic acid Gibberellin Salicylic acid Jasmonic acid Brassinosteroids Strigolactones Don’t worry about what these names mean or what these things are for now. I’ll be writing posts about them in the coming weeks. Hormones In human growth and development, … More Plant hormones: Auxin.
The history of science is vast. And even though the term science is recent in human history, humans have always been tinkerers and explorers. The history of plant science is no less interesting or complex. It is obviously is bigger than a single blog post. So here, I’ll give a highlight reel and get into … More History of plant science.
What is a plant? And why care about them or study them? These may seem like obvious questions. They’re the green things. Some of them we eat and we’ve been selectively breeding crops for ~10,000 years. As you’re reading, I invite you to think about where plants show up in your own life. There is … More What is a plant?
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