🎄 The Week in Botany December 19, 2022
It’s the last Week in Botany of the year, as I plan to be off work for Christmas week. There’s fewer jobs in the careers section than I’d like. I could pretend it’s people winding down for the end of the year, but it’s more me not keeping up with everything as my bronchitis has got a little worse again. There should be more jobs getting posted on site over the next week though.
Another place to look for jobs is on Mastodon. If you follow the account @plantscijobs@a.gup.pe you should see any message that tags @plantscijobs. If you’re advertising a job on Mastodon, including that handle will get your post automatically boosted to people following the account.
That’s it for the year. I hope you enjoy Christmas, Hanukkah or just some time off for the New Year. I’m off now to check in with the office manager, who’s been guarding the Christmas tree.
Have a Happy New Year,
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
On Botany One
An early start to the growing season doesn’t lead to a longer growing season in the Alps
Global warming is leading to longer growing seasons worldwide, with many plants growing earlier in spring and continuing longer in autumn thanks to warmer temperatures or so people say. Now, however, plant ecologists at the University of Basel have been able to show that this is not the case for the most common type of alpine grassland in the European Alps, where an earlier start leads to earlier ageing and leaves the grassland brown for months.
Plants named for the great, the good, and the bad..?
A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but where do these names come from? Nigel Chaffey reviews a book that explores the stories of some of the people behind the plant names.
A coffee with the founding mothers of the Women in Crop Science initiative
They say you can't be what you can't see, so meet the women showing that you can make it in Crop Science.
News & Views
Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help
Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective.
Plan to protect 30% of Earth divides and inspires at Cop15
The target is dominating at the biodiversity summit, but the problem of finding a balance between Indigenous peoples’ rights and conservation remains unresolved.
How to use the group_by function with your ecological data
How to use group_by() with other dplyr functions for ecological data wrangling like a pro.
How do community gardens work? A look at some of Houston's grow-your-own gardens
Facing job loss and food insecurity brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of Congolese refugee women took matters and earth into their own hands. Their community garden in Alief broke ground in November of 2020. Shamba Ya Amani, translating to the "Farm of Peace" in Swahili, has continued to grow and thrive alongside the community tending to it since its creation.
Exclusive: Deforestation of Brazilian savanna surged some 25% in a year, sources say
Deforestation in the world's most biologically diverse savanna, the Brazilian Cerrado, rose by around 25% in the 12 months through July from the previous period, two people familiar with the still unreleased government data told Reuters.
Our fields may be green, but we are failing to protect biodiversity
Professor Jane Stout looks at the COP15 UN biodiversity conference underway in Canada and reminds us why it is so important.
UN recognizes 10 pioneering initiatives that are restoring the natural world
Efforts from Central America to East Asia honoured as World Restoration Flagships
As the drought persists, one enchanted garden at the foot of the Sierra tends to people
At the foot of the Sierra, where square acre after square acre of industrial farmland is planted in precise rows, an unusual garden grows and climbs and spirals.
Tiehm’s Buckwheat Protected as Endangered Species
Tiehm’s buckwheat, which grows on just 10 acres of public land in the Silver Peak Range of Nevada’s Esmeralda County, is threatened by a proposed lithium mine that would destroy nearly all its habitat. In 2019 the Center petitioned the Service to protect the buckwheat, and in 2021 it filed a successful lawsuit to obtain Endangered Species Act protection, resulting in today’s listing.
Official launch of AlgaeTraits, a trait database for (European) seaweeds
Today we officially launch the AlgaeTraits portal, your gateway to a trait database for (European) seaweeds. The amazing diversity of seaweeds is reflected in the ecological and morphological characteristics of the various species. Seaweed traits and functional forms have therefore long been used as a tool to answer various ecological and evolutionary questions.
Nearly half of replanted trees die, but careful site selection can help
A recent survey of reforestation efforts in South and Southeast Asia found that about half of trees planted as part of such projects died within a decade.
They Fought the Lawn. And the Lawn’s Done.
After their homeowner association ordered them to replace their wildlife-friendly plants with turf grass, a Maryland couple sued. They ended up changing state law.
Scientists release UK roadmap for phosphorus
As fertiliser prices rocket, to around four times higher than they were in 2020, scientists are launching the UK’s first comprehensive strategy setting out how we could transform our management of phosphorus. It provides a roadmap for how the country can better manage this vital element, which plants need to grow and is essential for food production, but which is also behind environmental pollution in our rivers and lakes.
The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing.
Just launched: CGIAR Initiative on Nature-Positive Solutions
A new Research Initiative from CGIAR, which aims to re-imagine and co-create nature-positive food systems, launches this week in Kenya. It is part of a Portfolio that will deliver a new 10-year strategy to transform food, land, and water systems in a climate crisis. In this article, learn more about the purpose of this collaborative research.
We look at the past — and present — of tree-planting in Chicago
Chicago’s tree canopy has evolved over centuries. Today, “tree ambassadors” are helping plant more trees in neighborhoods that need them.
‘It made my heart sing’: finding herbs and medicine in the Bronx food forest
The Bronx River Foodway, the only legal place to forage in New York, celebrates the end of a season.
Brazil greenlights first gene-edited, drought-resistant soybean
The Argentinean company GDM, which works on soybean genetic improvement, obtained this year approval from the National Technical Biosafety Commission (CNTBio) for its first drought-tolerant soybean obtained through gene editing.
How plant roots go with the flow
How do environmental cues steer the branching of plant roots? Insights into how water availability shapes root growth reveal an unexpected mechanism behind the hormone-mediated regulation of this process.
Norton Gardens' new butterfly oasis shows benefits of non-natives
The new pollinator/butterfly garden at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens opened last Sunday to great fanfare, and the butterflies, as if on cue, were all in attendance.
Scientific Papers
The global spectrum of plant form and function: enhanced species-level trait dataset
Díaz et al. provide the ‘Global Spectrum of Plant Form and Function Dataset’, containing species mean values for six vascular plant traits. Together, these traits –plant height, stem specific density, leaf area, leaf mass per area, leaf nitrogen content per dry mass, and diaspore (seed or spore) mass – define the primary axes of variation in plant form and function. The dataset is based on ca. 1 million trait records received via the TRY database (representing ca. 2,500 original publications) and additional unpublished data. It provides 92,159 species mean values for the six traits, covering 46,047 species.
TLS2trees: a scalable tree segmentation pipeline for TLS data
Above Ground Biomass (AGB) is an important metric used to quantify the mass of carbon stored in terrestrial ecosystems. For forests, this is routinely estimated at the plot scale (typically ≥1 ha) using inventory measurements and allometry. In recent years, Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) has appeared as a disruptive technology that can generate a more accurate assessment of tree and plot scale AGB; however, operationalising TLS methods has had to overcome a number of challenges. One such challenge is the segmentation of individual trees from plot level point clouds that are required to estimate woody volume, this is often done manually (e.g. with interactive point cloud editing software) and can be very time consuming. Wilkes et al. present TLS2trees, an automated processing pipeline and set of Python command line tools that aims to redress this processing bottleneck.
Resurrection of plant disease resistance proteins via helper NLR bioengineering
Parasites counteract host immunity by suppressing helper NLR proteins that function as central nodes in immune receptor networks. Understanding the mechanisms of immunosuppression can lead to strategies for bioengineering disease resistance. Contreras et al. show that a cyst nematode virulence effector binds and inhibits oligomerization of the helper NLR protein NRC2 by physically preventing intramolecular rearrangements required for activation. A single amino acid polymorphism at the binding interface between NRC2 and the inhibitor is sufficient for this helper NLR to evade immune suppression, thereby restoring the activity of multiple disease resistance genes.
The global distribution and environmental drivers of the soil antibiotic resistome
Delgado-Baquerizo et al. show that antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) peaked in high latitude cold and boreal forests. Climatic seasonality and mobile genetic elements, associated with the transmission of antibiotic resistance, were also key drivers of their global distribution. Dominant ARGs were mainly related to multidrug resistance genes and efflux pump machineries. They further pinpointed the global hotspots of the diversity and proportions of soil ARGs.
Conservation of an Agrobacterium cT-DNA insert in Camellia section Thea reveals the ancient origin of tea plants from a genetically modified ancestor
Many higher plants contain cellular T-DNA (cT-DNA) sequences from Agrobacterium and have been called “natural genetically modified organisms” (nGMOs). Among these natural transformants, the tea plant Camellia sinensis var. sinensis cv. Shuchazao contains a single 5.5 kb T-DNA fragment (CaTA) with three inactive T-DNA genes, with a 1 kb inverted repeat at the ends. Camellia plants are allogamous, so that each individual may contain two different CaTA alleles.
Notulae to the Italian native vascular flora: 14
In this contribution, new data concerning the distribution of native vascular flora in Italy are presented. It includes new records, confirmations, and status changes to the Italian administrative regions.
Cutting the long branches: Consilience as a path to unearth the evolutionary history of Gnetales
The Gnetales are one of the most fascinating groups within seed plants. Although the advent of molecular phylogenetics has generated some confidence in their phylogenetic placement of Gnetales within seed plants, their macroevolutionary history still presents many unknowns. Coiro et al. review the reasons for such unknowns, and they focus the discussion on the presence of “long branches” both in their molecular and morphological history.
Continuous monitoring of chemical signals in plants under stress
Time is an often-neglected variable in biological research. Plants respond to biotic and abiotic stressors with a range of chemical signals, but as plants are non-equilibrium systems, single-point measurements often cannot provide sufficient temporal resolution to capture these time-dependent signals. In this article, Coatsworth et al. critically review the advances in continuous monitoring of chemical signals in living plants under stress.
miR472 deficiency enhances Arabidopsis thaliana defence without reducing seed production
After having co-existed in plant genomes for at least 200 million years, the products of microRNA (miRNA) and Nucleotide-Binding Leucine Rich Repeat protein (NLR) genes formed a regulatory relationship in the common ancestor of modern gymnosperms and angiosperms. The potential evolutionary advantage of such regulation remains largely unknown and might be related to two mutually non-exclusive scenarios: miRNA-dependent regulation of NLR levels might prevent defence mis-activation with negative effects on plant growth and reproduction; or reduction of active miRNA levels in response to pathogen derived molecules (PAMPS and silencing suppressors) might rapidly release otherwise silent NLR transcripts for rapid translation and thereby enhance defence. Vasseur et al. used Arabidopsis thaliana plants deficient for miR472 function to study the impact of releasing its NLR targets on plant growth and reproduction and on defence against the fungal pathogen Plectospharaella cucumerina.
Dynamic chromatin accessibility deploys heterotypic cis/trans-acting factors driving stomatal cell-fate commitment
Chromatin architecture and transcription factor (TF) binding underpin cell-fate specification during development, but their mutual regulatory relationships remain unclear. Kim et al. report an atlas of dynamic chromatin landscapes during stomatal cell-lineage progression, in which sequential cell-state transitions are governed by lineage-specific bHLH TFs. Major reprogramming of chromatin accessibility occurs at the proliferation-to-differentiation transition. They discover novel co-cis regulatory elements (CREs) signifying the early precursor stage.
Recent advances in crop transformation technologies
Chen et al. review recent discoveries that are rapidly advancing nuclear transformation technologies and promise to overcome the obstacles that have so far impeded the widespread adoption of genome editing in crop species.
The re-emergence of Liberica coffee as a major crop plant
The failure of Liberica coffee as a global crop plant by the turn of the twentieth century was due to a number of factors, including the inappropriate selection of material for global dissemination. Renewed interest in this species, particularly in the excelsa variant, is evident across the coffee supply chain. In a warming world, and in an era beset with supply chain disruption, Liberica coffee could re-emerge as a major crop plant.
Air-seq: Measuring air metagenomic diversity in an agricultural ecosystem
Giolai et al. add to the evidence that aerial environmental DNA can be used as a source for biomonitoring in agricultural and more general terrestrial ecosystems. The ability to detect fluxes and occurrence patterns of species and strains with high throughput sample processing and analysis technologies highlights the value of airborne environmental DNA in monitoring biodiversity changes and tracking of taxa of human interest or concern.
Careers
You can see the full list of open posts we’ve noted here. These are the posts added this week.
Plant Pathology & Quality Assurance Senior Scientific Officer
The post is within the Plant Health Diagnostic Section of Grassland & Plant Science Branch and will report to the Principal Scientific Officer (PSO) of plant health diagnostics. The position will satisfy a dual remit across statutory surveillance and diagnostics, and will lead in the development and maintenance of ISO9001 and ISO17025 accreditation in Plant Health, as well as performing research on a variety of agricultural and environmental issues relevant to Northern Ireland principally, but with national and international relevance. The successful candidate must have a good knowledge of scientific quality assurance, with expertise in areas pertaining to pests and pathogens of plants, and must have skills in either fungi, oomycetes, bacteria, viruses, nematodes, or insects. Knowledge of molecular biology is essential for this position.
Senior Research Technician (Fixed term)
Applications are invited for the above post in the Division of Plant and Crop Sciences. The successful candidate will join the research laboratory of Dr John Foulkes, investigating avenues for the improvement of nitrogen-use efficiency and grain quality in wheat. The Plant and Crop Sciences Division is internationally acclaimed as a centre of excellence for fundamental and applied research underpinning our understanding of agriculture, food production and quality, and the natural environment. The post-holder will work in the newly refurbished Plant and Crop Sciences laboratories that are part of the School of Biosciences, and in the extensive glasshouse facilities and the 30 ha of field experimental sites of the Division.
Instructor – Biological Sciences
Santa Barbara City College is seeking a full-time, tenure track faculty member position in the Biological Sciences Program to start in Fall 2023. In 2009, SBCC was designated as an Hispanic-Serving Institution, reflecting our responsibility to support and serve the needs of our Latina/o/x students. The Department seeks a broadly trained biologist knowledgeable in general biological principles and modern research techniques who also has a strong commitment to teaching using a variety of instructional methodologies. This position is focused on teaching lectures and laboratories in introductory biology (biology, botany, zoology) for non-biology majors. Teaching assignments may include weeknights and Saturdays. Other responsibilities include participation in the governance of the college via committee assignments, maintenance of a sufficient number of office hours to meet student needs and full participation in departmental meetings and activities.
PhD Studentship: In Biology – Smart Materials for Plant Health: Passive Monitoring of Viruses and Viral Vectors
The PhD candidate will design molecular cascades capable of identifying target viruses and viral vectors. You will experimentally test designs for sensitivity and specificity. You will be trained in mathematical modelling of biological systems and in the use of statistical Design of Experiments. By coupling these skills with pipetting robotics available in our laboratory, you will rapidly test, understand and optimise molecular performance. Further, you will take advantage of our expertise in embedding cell-free molecular biology reactions in physical chassis to develop multifunctional materials.
Assistant or Associate Professor
We wish to appoint excellent and ambitious early to mid-career principal investigators who are capable of developing innovative and original research programmes. This post is in the area of host responses to microbes which may include host-pathogen interactions and/or host-microbiome interactions. All applicants must demonstrate proven track records in publication and research income. We particularly welcome applicants with independent fellowships and researchers who can bridge between disciplines and will benefit from Warwick’s strong interdisciplinary and international research community.
Postdoctoral Research Officer in Environmental Science
Applications are invited for the above full time 24-month fixed-term postdoctoral research position to support the research work being undertaken by Prof Davey Jones in Environment Centre Wales in the fields of soil-plant-microbial science, nutrient cycling and sustainable agricultural practice, extreme events and greenhouse gas emissions. We are seeking a postdoctoral level candidate to help undertake laboratory and field experiments that support ongoing projects (e.g. plastic pollution in the terrestrial biosphere, nitrogen use efficiency in agriculture, soil carbon cycling, rhizosphere biology, sensors). It is expected that the post will generate a wide range of high quality journal papers. It is expected that the post will aid in the supervision of PhD students working in the group to help them achieve their maximum potential. This post would therefore suit a candidate who would like to build their mentoring skills whilst also being given freedom to undertake high impact research in areas mutually agreed by the candidate and the team. The post is ideally suited to someone who is looking to build towards a future fellowship application.
Post-doctoral Fellow in Ecology in the School of Biological Sciences
Applicants should possess a Ph.D. degree in insect ecology, with experience in, and knowledge of, plant-herbivore-predator interactions and Biogenic Volatile Organic Compounds (BVOCs). Those who are going to complete the Ph.D. degree are also welcome. They should also have experience in field work, good problem-solving skills, strong publishing record, good time management and the ability to work collaboratively. Applicants who have experience in tropical ecology, manipulative ecological experiments, canopy climbing, knowledge of molecular skills and with scientific communication skills are desirable.
Postdoctor on the Project Wall2Cycle Coordination Between Cell Wall Integrity and cell Cycle
This position is for working in the Functional Plant Biology Group, led by Prof. Thorsten Hamann. The project leader for this project is Dr. Laura Bacete. We are located in Trondheim (Norway), at the Department of Biology of NTNU, a very international and scientifically competent department. We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher with a background in Plant Molecular Biology who will join us for a period of three years. The starting date must be within the first quarter of 2023.
Network Research Manager, Agriculture Science
Applications are invited for the temporary post of Research Manager within the UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science. The successful candidate will work to ensure the smooth implementation of a Marie Sklodowska -Curie Action Doctoral Network (DN) ROOTED.
ROOTED is an integrated, interdisciplinary education, training and skills development programme rolling out the next generation of Agricultural, Plant and Soil Science leaders. The EU-funded ROOTED project (Root Phenotyping Integrated Educational Doctoral Network) will increase our knowledge of how plant roots interact with their environment from a physiological and phenotypic perspective. The use of artificial intelligence and deep learning will speed up image analysis and processing, resulting in greater data generation. The project will also train a new generation of multi-skilled scientists capable of innovating in the fields of plant and soil sciences and contributing to the EU’s Green deal and a Soil Deal for Europe.
Research Fellow, Biological Sciences
This is one of the three open positions for Postdoctoral Fellows (Research Fellows) in the lab of Yuchen Long. The successful candidate will work on an interdisciplinary project on the biomechanical regulations in plant development. Our lab is interested in how biomechanical inputs, particularly tissue mechanics and hydraulics, contribute to the developmental processes in the plant meristematic tissues.
The main responsibilities of the position include:
Designing and executing research works related to plant biomechanics, growth, and development.
Guiding junior members including PhD students and research assistants.
Lecturer / Associate Professor / Professor in Plant-Organism Interactions
Five Faculty positions (Lecturer/Associate Professor/Professor) in Molecular Biosciences encompassing Microbial Systems, Advanced Cell Biology and Plant Organism Interactions.
Appointments will be either as Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor, salary range £40,931 to £51,805) Associate Professor (salary range £53,353 to £67,060) or Professor (maximum 2, starting salary £70,119) in the following areas:
Microbial Systems You will add synergy and/or a new dimension to our thriving research in microbial systems from the role of the microbiome in agriculture to the role of our own microbiome in immunology and mental health. We are especially interested in research questions related to biofilms and complex data analytics.
Advanced Cell Biology You will have skills in advanced imaging and experimental biology to address research questions in animals, plants or microbes.
Plant Organism Interactions You will be researching a topic that addresses food security. We are well-equipped for this work with a dedicated Plant Growth Facility and licenced Invertebrate Facility, both with environmentally controlled rooms.