This week, I’m going to write about a Genetically modified crop plant brought into the world by nature. Did you think only humans could genetically modify organisms? Nature’s been at it since long before humans were around. An international team of researchers published a paper in PNAS about the discovery of two T-DNA loci in … More A Naturally Genetically Modified Organism.
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.
Quiet Branches started off with a broad definition of how plants show up in our lives. Two weeks ago, I wrote about translating research into practical products. And highlighted the many ways biotechnology shows up in our lives every day, in some critical (feeding the world) and fun ways (color changing petunias!). The video from … More Norman Borlaug.
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.
This post touches on a lot of things. I wasn’t aware of just how many things interlinked in this story. So I hope you enjoy the story of the discovery of cytokinins, and the connections made herein. This year is the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the first cytokinin, kinetin. And this one is … More The Discovery of Cytokinin.
The Quiet Branches 