This is a guest post about a new plant science community resource by Erin Sparks, Guillaume Lobet, Larry York and Frédéric Bouché It is midnight on a cold winter evening and you are scheduled to give a seminar at 8 am the next morning. All you are missing to complete your presentation is one last … More A community repository of plant illustrations
This is a follow on to last week’s post, here. Last week I wrote about two papers from The Plant Cell about how plant cells figure out their identity. As part of that, I looked back in the archives of Plant Physiology (first issue 90 years ago– 1926) and The Plant Cell (first issue 1989) and scrolled through … More Resolution of Plants over time.
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.
I got back from Plant Biology 2016 in Austin, TX a few days ago and have been trying to dive back into projects there though I also need some rest too. Conferencing is exhausting. That said, conferences and engaging in the online community are worthwhile. Though the meeting was a blur of twitter, attending sessions, … More Plant Biology 2016 reflections.
I’m heading to Plant Biology 2016 in Austin, TX tomorrow and will be writing form there on the ASPB blog and seeking stories of plant science to write about in the coming months. There are also some other writing projects for other blogs and a society magazine I am writing this month, so this space … More Plant Biology, 2016 Austin, TX
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.
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
Last week, I wrote about the marine plant, Zostera marina (Also covered on The Global Plant Council Blog by Sarah Jose), a rare plant that has adapted to living completely under the sea. This plant would have to re-evolve some traits to make the transition back to land (e.g. pores on the leaves to enable gas … More Habitat Loss, Climate Change, and the Story of Three plants.
In what are now the Northern coastal oceans started getting greener ~65 million years ago, around the time when most dinosaurs went extinct. A distant relative of grasses was put on the evolutionary path to colonize the oceans. This new colonizer may have been the result of something plants routinely do to form new species: … More A Flowering Plant Under the Sea.
Percy Lavon Julian was born in 1899 in Montgomery, Alabama. He would grow up to change the history of medicine and US agriculture through his discoveries in natural products chemistry. He also managed to get rich doing it. He was a gifted teacher and speaker. He engaged undergraduates in productive (i.e. published) research, hired a … More Percy Julian, Natural Products Chemist.
The Quiet Branches 