🌻 The Week in Botany January 13, 2025
This week has a few old papers listed as popular. Most are connected to the Los Angeles fires story. One is not, and I can only assume that it’s because John Manners thought to include a photo of a plant leaf. It is quite a leaf, and shows what an arresting image can do for attracting attention.
Last week was busy with a conference and a site redesign. This week should be easier but look busier, as I’ll be wanting to get some of the backlog of posts we have written published.
There will be another email of the papers you’re sharing on Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and Twitter next week. Until next week, take care.
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
On Botany One
A New Look for Botany One in 2025
A brief description of why the site design has changed, and introducing Pulse, an algorithm that attempts to track what is currently trending on Botanical Bluesky.
Forest Timekeepers Falter as Global Temperatures Rise
Scientists found that rising temperatures can mess up the internal clocks of trees, making it harder for them to survive and grow, especially for those living in colder areas.
News & Views
Open Flower: Designer Plants for Teaching Biotechnology
Nick Desnoyer seeks to make a collection of designer flowers as the basis for a project teaching principles of plant biotechnology. This grant will support the engineering of these flowers to be provided for hands-on experiments in university practicals where students can design and analyze their own flowers.
New seed fossil sheds light on wind dispersal in plants
Scientists have discovered one of the earliest examples of a winged seed, granting insight into the origin and early evolution of wind dispersal strategies in plants.
Wildflower families: Rosaceae, the Rose family
Wildflower families: Rosaceae, the Rose family is the latest blog in a series on common wildflower families, thanks to my online Field Studies Council course. Learning about the botany of a plant and its family, and similarities within a family, is very useful when it comes to being a botanical illustrator.
Trees ‘remember’ wetter times − never having known abundant rain could buffer today’s young forests against climate change
What does the future hold for forests in a warmer, drier world? Over the past 25 years, trees have been dying due to effects of climate change around the world. In Africa, Asia, North America, South America and Europe, drought stress amplified by heat is killing trees that have survived for centuries.
From farm to forest: the volunteers planting 100,000 trees in Somerset
A woodland charity has enlisted about 1,000 people to create Lower Chew Forest and help fight climate breakdown.
'Replanting my mum's Christmas tree is her legacy'
A woman who gave her late mother's Christmas tree to a rewilding project says it is "very special" to hear it is thriving one year on.
Bird Buddy’s new camera tracks plants and insects in your garden
The new Petal camera uses AI to identify what’s happening in your yard.
The Plant Lady - Botany 101
Marlene teaches Tina some key plant terms!
The Plantaform smart indoor garden uses NASA tech to grow plants with fog
A "Nespresso for your vegetables."
Tour Marche Arboretum, a new 'museum' of plants in Belgium
Marche Arboretum is a joyful new green space in Belgium, dedicated to nature and science – and a Wallpaper* Design Award 2025 winner.
Scientific Papers
A single-nuclei transcriptome census of the Arabidopsis maturing root identifies that MYB67 controls phellem cell maturation (FREE)
Employing single-nuclei sequencing, Millar et al have generated an expression census capturing the complete developmental progression of Arabidopsis root phellem cells, from their progenitor cell type, the pericycle, through to their maturation. With this, they identify a whole suite of genes underlying this process, including MYB67, which we show has a role in phellem cell maturation.
♻️ A new species of Coccoloba P. Browne (Polygonaceae) from the Brazilian Amazon with exceptionally large leaves (FREE)
de Melo et al describe and illustrate a new species of Coccoloba (Polygonaceae), named Coccoloba gigantifolia, from the Brazilian Amazon. It resembles Coccoloba mollis Casar, but differs from the latter species by its much larger leaves in the fertile branches.
@jmaus.bsky.social
Activation and memory of the heatshock response is mediated by Prion-like domains of sensory HSFs in Arabidopsis ($)
Plants are able to sense and remember heat stress. An initial priming heat stress enables plants to acclimate so that they are able to survive a subsequent higher temperature. The heatshock transcription factors (HSFs) play a crucial role in this process, but the mechanisms by which plants sense heat stress are not well understood. By comprehensively analyzing the binding targets of all the HSFs, we find that HSFs act in a network, with upstream sensory acting in a transcriptional cascade to activate downstream HSFs and protective proteins.
♻️ Spatial Distribution of Wildfires Ignited under Katabatic versus Non-Katabatic Winds in Mediterranean Southern California USA (FREE)
Wildfires are a major hazard to humans in the southern California Mediterranean ecosystem and improving our understanding and delineation of different fire regimes is critical to mitigating wildfire-related hazards. Recent research has demonstrated that there are two distinct fire regimes in this region based on the presence or absence of katabatic winds (primarily Santa Ana winds) concurrent with the fire. Kolden & Abatzoglou expand the katabatic wind category to include Sundowner winds along the Santa Barbara front range and analyze the spatial relationships and difference in ignition sources between fires associated with katabatic and non-katabatic wind events from 1948–2017.
The fastest-growing and most destructive fires in the US (2001 to 2020) ($)
Balch et al. used satellite data to show that the growth rate of wildfires across the contiguous US increased substantially between 2001 and 2020, particularly throughout the West and in parts of the East.
♻️ Ignitions explain more than temperature or precipitation in driving Santa Ana wind fires (FREE)
Autumn and winter Santa Ana wind (SAW)–driven wildfires play a substantial role in area burned and societal losses in southern California. Temperature during the event and antecedent precipitation in the week or month prior play a minor role in determining area burned.
A rare PRIMER cell state in plant immunity (FREE)
Nobori et al infect Arabidopsis thaliana leaves with bacterial pathogens that trigger or supress immune responses and integrate time-resolved single-cell transcriptomic, epigenomic and spatial transcriptomic data to identify cell states. They describe cell-state-specific gene-regulatory logic that involves transcription factors, putative cis-regulatory elements and target genes associated with disease and immunity.
Natural variation modifies centromere-proximal meiotic crossover frequency and segregation distortion in Arabidopsis thaliana (FREE)
Gorringe et al used fluorescent crossover reporters to survey the effect of natural variation on centromere-proximal recombination in twelve F1 hybrids, capturing Arabidopsis Eurasian and relict diversity. The majority of F1 hybrids showed either elevated or suppressed centromere-proximal crossovers (49 of 60), relative to inbreds.
A landscape-scale view of soil organic matter dynamics ($)
Doetterl et al outline how understanding soil formation processes and complexity at the landscape scale can inform predictions of soil organic matter cycling and soil carbon sequestration.
Read free through ReadCube: https://rdcu.be/d52ig
Global rise in forest fire emissions linked to climate change in the extratropics ($)
Anthropogenic climate change has made wildfires bigger, hotter, and more common. Jones et al. used a machine learning approach to break down the “why” and “where” of the observed increases.
In AoBC Publications
The PLANTS grant is open to current undergraduates, including community college students, and those who are graduating the year of the Botany Conference they will be attending.
Participants must be available and commit to attend the entire meeting -- arriving in time for dinner Saturday (5 pm) and leaving Thursday morning -- and participate in PLANTS programing.
Careers
Note: These are posts that have been advertised around the web. They are not posts that I personally offer, nor can I arrange the visa for you to work internationally.
Postdoctoral Research Associate in Molecular Plant Science, Durham
The Durham Bioscience Dept is seeking to appoint a motivated and skilled Postdoctoral Researcher in molecular plant science to investigate the biophysics of marine (macroalgal) cell wall polymers under physiological and stress conditions.
PhD Candidate on CRISPR-based genome editing in plants, Brno
In our laboratory, we developed a method for CRISPR-based genome editing in oilseed rape (Brassica napus) and Arabidopsis thaliana using hairy root cultures to study specific genes and their regulatory sequences. The PhD candidate will use Molecular biology approaches to assess the functionality and efficiency of various CRISPR editing constructs, transformation methods (stable versus transient), and regeneration protocols to develop transgene-free, genome-edited plant lines in various Brassicaceae species.
Convocatòria 016/2024_LE de Professorat Lector, Girona
Position of tenure-track lecturer in Botany in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Girona. It is a fixed-term contract (tenure track) for a maximum of 6 years with the possibility of consolidation to a permanent position.
Assistant Professor, Wisconsin
University of Wisconsin - Madison seeks to hire a 9-month tenure track Extension Specialist in Corn Production Systems to provide leadership in developing and delivering corn grain and silage outreach and research in Wisconsin.
Assistant Project Scientist, California
Applications are invited for appointment as Assistant Project Scientist at the Department of Land, Air, and Water Resources, the University of California Davis. We are seeking a highly motivated scholar to develop remote sensing algorithms and data-driven machine learning analytics for improving ecosystem resilience and agriculture sustainability. The candidate will be involved with projects on monitoring, modeling, and forecasting eco-hydrological dynamics.
Research Agronomist, North Dakota
The North Dakota State University (NDSU) Langdon Research Extension Center (LREC) research agronomist will have overall agronomy research leadership responsibility for developing, implementing, and delivering outcomes of the agronomy research program at the LREC to our constituents. The agronomy research program includes a broad scope of projects that address factors limiting crop production for crops grown in North Dakota (ND) with an emphasis of crops grown in the northeastern part of the state.
Post Doctoral Research Associate, North Carolina
The employee's principal research responsibilities will be to conduct field and laboratory experiments to evaluate the effect of different climate adaptive agronomic management practices (cover cropping, manure application, crop rotation etc.) on hemp performance, soil nutrient cycling and greenhouse gas emissions.