đ» The Week in Botany May 26, 2025
Congratulations to the gardeners at Jacksonville Zoo, or as it should properly be known now, Jacksonville Zoo AND Botanical Gardens. The press release adds âJacksonville Zoo and Botanical Gardens is a first-of-its-kind botanical garden that, unlike other zoos, is integrated among the animal exhibits, offering guests an experience that connects them to both wildlife and the natural beauty of plant life.â
Being able to foreground the importance of plants in habitats sounds a lot more interesting to me than just having a sign saying âHereâs the feeding times for the otters.â I hope we see a lot of research and activity coming out of there.
My own bookshelf garden, is definitely not botanic, unless âwhich carnivorous plants can survive under grow lamps on a bookshelf?â counts as a botanic research question. It is up and after 24 hours, all the plants still seem to be alive.
This weekâs tasks include working on updating the mailing list system. It seems people are getting randomly unsubscribed, which is not helpful. The first test of the new system goes out today, thereâll be a bigger test next week, and if all goes well, Iâll try moving everyone to the new system the week after.
There will be another email of the papers and the news stories youâre sharing on Mastodon and Bluesky. Until next time, take care.
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
On Botany One
Buzz, Bounce, and Stick: The Secret Role of a Flowerâs Petal
A specialised petal in a buzz-pollinated flower acts like a pollen traffic controller, guiding grains to the perfect spot on a beeâs body.
Fronds with Benefits
New research reveals how plant leaf shapes affect your mood. Small, complex leaves calm while large leaves energise our spaces.
Mario Vallejo-Marin: Buzzing Questions in Pollination
Botany One interviews Dr Mario Vallejo-Marin, a Mexican evolutionary biologist interested in the evolutionary interplay between plants and pollinators.
Curse of the perfect graft: how the haustorium allows parasitic plants to infect
Dodder plants act as nature's master grafters, seamlessly hijacking other plants' vascular systems for survival.
News & Views
Plants Communicating Through Chemistry: A Conversation with Jordan Dowell
In this episode, the host Shiran Ben Zeev and guest Jordan Dowell nerd out on a discussion of how plants choose to defend themselves against predators and/or manipulate other organisms to help them live their best lives, and how plants use chemistry to communicate---and what we can learn from that. They talk about the special challenges of surviving and thriving in harsh environments and touch on the evolution of chemical diversity and the effects of chemical diversity on organismal interactions across spatial and temporal scales.
Professor Julian Hibberd elected as Fellow of the Royal Society
Congratulations to Julian Hibberd, Professor of Photosynthesis and Head of the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, who has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, the UKâs national academy of sciences.
Plant cell sculptors: How key proteins take on different roles to shape development
New research from the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge has shed light on how plants precisely control their growth and development, revealing that seemingly similar molecular components fulfil surprisingly different jobs.
ASPB Presidentâs Update: ASPB Election SeasonâToward a More Engaged and Transparent Nominations Process
Elections are now underway for officers to serve in leadership positions for the Society. Several updates have been made to the process in recent years to improve community engagement and enhance transparency, and a change in the way nominations are solicited was clarified and approved recently in our ASPB Constitution and Bylaws.
USGSâ biological research arm could vanish next week
Trump is on a multipronged mission to eliminate a science agency that conservationists, toxicologists, universities and more call irreplaceable.
Evolution of plant network: 600 million years of stress
A research team led by the University of Göttingen has compared algae and plants that span 600 million years of independent evolution and pinpointed a shared stress response network using advanced bioinformatic methods.
Back to Basics: Contributions of Plant Science to Fundamental Scientific Concepts
Plant biology has always been at the center of biological research. When most people think about biology, they often think of human physiologyâdoctors with stethoscopes, the structure of the heart, or the brain. I know, at least when I was in school, the image of biology often revolved around humans or animals, rather than plants. However, over the years, as I delved deeper into biological sciences, I realized that plant biology, often overlooked, has contributed enormously to the advancement of biological research.
Is a photo subversive? NSF staff overcome obstacles to 75th anniversary portrait
Management tried to quash outpouring of support for beleaguered agency.
Plants in the literary tradition
Nigel Chaffey reviews The Cambridge handbook of literature and plants edited by Bonnie Lander Johnson.
How an idealistic tree-planting project turned into Kenyaâs toxic, thorny nightmare
Introduced from South America, mathenge was intended to halt desertification, but now three-quarters of the country is at risk of invasion by the invasive tree.
Scientific Papers
Foraging for water by MIZ1-mediated antagonism between root gravitropism and hydrotropism (FREE)
Root hydrotropism is critical for a plantâs ability to seek water. Despite its crucial role in adapting to drought, the underlying mechanisms remain elusive. Zhang et al reveal that the master hydrotropism regulator, MIZU-KUSSEI 1 (MIZ1), inhibits gravitropism to promote hydrotropic root bending.
TropiRoot 1.0: Database of tropical root characteristics across environments (FREE)
Tropical ecosystems contain the world's largest biodiversity of vascular plants. Yet, our understanding of tropical functional diversity and its contribution to global diversity patterns is constrained by data availability. This discrepancy underscores an urgent need to bridge data gaps by incorporating comprehensive tropical root data into global datasets. Cordeiro et al provide a database of tropical root characteristics. This new database, TropiRoot 1.0, will be instrumental in evaluating an array of hypotheses pertaining to root functional ecology and plant biogeography, both within the tropics and relative to other global biomes.
From plant traits to fire behavior: Scaling issues in flammability studies ($)
Despite fire being one of the oldest and most important ecological disturbance processes on Earth, many aspects of fireâvegetation feedbacks are poorly understood, limiting their accurate representation in predictive models. Translating plant flammability traits to fire behavior and fire effects on ecosystems has proven a challenge with different disciplines approaching the problem at widely different scales.
The promise of digital herbarium specimens in large-scale phenology research (FREE)
The online mobilization of herbaria has made tens of millions of specimens digitally available, revolutionizing investigations of phenology and plant responses to climate change. Ahlstrand et al identify two main themes associated with this growing body of research and highlight a selection of recent publications exemplifying: investigating phenology at large spatial and temporal scales and in understudied locations and testing long-standing theories and novel questions in ecology and evolution that were not previously answerable.
The transcriptional regulator VAL1 promotes Arabidopsis flowering by repressing the organ boundary genes BOP1 and BOP2 ($)
Cheng et al combined genetic and transcriptomic approaches to investigate the requirement of VAL1 for flowering activation under different day lengths. They found that VAL1, but not its sister protein VAL2, is required to induce the floral transition both under long and short days.
Exploring the untapped potential of single-cell and spatial omics in plant biology (FREE)
This review highlights the current applications of single-cell and spatial omics technologies in plant research and introduces emerging approaches with the potential to transform the field.
In defense of funding foundational plant science (FREE)
This commentary in the Plant Cell continues to be shared by biologists.
Variation in responses to temperature across admixed genotypes of Populus trichocarpa Ă P. balsamifera predict geographic shifts in regions where hybrids are favored (FREE)
The North American hybrid zone of Populus trichocarpa and P. balsamifera represents a natural system in which reaction norms are likely to vary with underlying genetic variation that has been shaped by climate, geography, and introgression. Mead et al leverage a dataset containing 45 clonal genotypes of varying ancestry from this natural hybrid zone, planted across 17 replicated common garden experiments spanning a broad climatic range, including sites warmer than the natural species ranges.
Identifying direct TARGETs of transcription factors in wheat (FREE)
Knight et al have adapted the Arabidopsis thaliana TARGET system (Transient Assay Reporting Genome-wide Effects of Transcription factors) developed by Bargmann et al., 2013, to wheat.
An ancient plant symbiotic fungus with distinct features identified through advanced fluorescence and Raman imaging (FREE)
The occurrence of mycorrhizae is now well established in c. 85% of extant plants, yet the geological record of these associations is sparse. Fossil evidence from early Paleozoic terrestrial environments provides rare insights into these ancient symbioses, but imaging micro-scale fossil fungi in surrounding plant tissues is challenging. Strullu-Derrien et al employed brightfield microscopy, confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM), fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM), and Raman spectroscopy to investigate a newly identified endomycorrhizal fungus within a 407-million-year-old plant from the Windyfield Chert.
Fight or Flight: The Impact of Post-Tenure Evaluations on Faculty Productivity and Selection (FREE)
This paper examines the labor market effects of Florida's 2022 post-tenure review policy, which weakened tenure protections at public universities. Using a differencein-differences approach, we compare faculty outcomes in Florida to nearby states. We find the policy increased faculty exits-particularly among high-performing researchers-indicating a brain drain rather than improved selection.
Effect of climate on traits of dominant and rare tree species in the worldâs forests (FREE)
The extent to which traits of dominant and rare tree species differ remains untested across a broad environmental range, limiting our understanding of how species traits and the environment shape forest functional composition. Hordijk et al use a global dataset of tree composition of >22,000 forest plots and 11 traits of 1663 tree species to ask how locally dominant and rare species differ in their trait values, and how these differences are driven by climatic gradients in temperature and water availability in forest biomes across the globe.
In AoBC Publications
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.
Graduate Research Assistant (0.5), Exeter
The Faculty wishes to recruit a Graduate Research Assistant to support the work of Dr Chris Laing. This South West Water funded post has an expected start date this summer for two years. The successful applicant will be expected to conduct desk-based studies of the literature, carry out field work to collect plant samples from subtidal seagrass beds, process them in the laboratory and display the results of this work with maps in reports.
PhD Studentships, Reading
Patterns of Diversification and Island Colonization of the Bulb Autonoe in Macaronesia
Can Mycorrhizal Symbiosis Improve Plant Growth in Acid-leached Mine Tailings?
Impacts of Ectomycorrhizal Inoculation on Oak Regeneration in Former Farmland: Getting to the Root of the Matter
M/F PhD offer: sexual selection and cryptic female choice in plants
In the context of the ERC project SEXIPLANTS (coordinated by Jeanne Tonnabel), this PhD aims at testing the most fundamental predictions of sexual selection theory, including female choice models (Fisherian and good-genes models) with a special focus on pollen and pistil traits. Indeed, cryptic female choice in plants might stem from simple morphological pistil traits or from the physiology of pistil tissues, which is known to actively provide nutritive and guidance molecules to pollen tubes. The PhD will benefit from a unique material developed for plants: the output of an experimental evolution protocol in which lines of Brassica rapa 'fast plants' have been maintained for 19 generations in monogamy vs. polygamy. The PhD candidate will study the evolution of pollen and pistil traits in these experimental evolution lines, but also the paternity biases induced by those traits and the genetic correlations between them through quantitative genetics.
PhD student (f/m/d) in the field of Root Anatomy and Physiology, Gatersleben
This PhD project is part of a large consortium, including researchers from the Netherlands, aimed at understanding root tissues that can function as barriers to water and solute movement. You will closely collaborate with other researchers in the project and group, including experts in genetics and rhizosphere biology, and have the opportunity to travel to the Netherlands to participate in shared experiments and project meetings.
Scientist (m/f/d) Pre-Breeding Rapeseed, Einbeck
Are you looking for an exciting career opportunity in a globally operating, sustainable company? Then you've come to the right place! KWS SAAT SE & Co. KGaA is seeking a scientist (m/f/d) in the area of pre-breeding in rapeseed breeding. In this role, you will work as part of an international team of plant breeders and scientists. This diverse position is limited to 1.5 years as a maternity leave replacement and is to be filled full-time. The role is based at Einbeck, Lower Saxony.
Tenured academic staff / Tenure track lecturer Plant-soil microbiome interactions, Hasselt
The department of Biology seeks a researcher who will explore the role of microorganisms in soil and plant health, ecosystem functions and ecosystem responses to environmental stressors such as climate change, pollution, and land use changes. Possible research lines extend to ecosystem remediation, restoration, or mitigation.
PhD Candidate Plant-pathogenic Fungus Interaction, Amsterdam
One of the most challenging problems for lettuce cultivation in the Netherlands and worldwide is lettuce wilt disease caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum (Fo). In this new project we collaborate with the University of Utrecht and several companies to elucidate the molecular basis of pathogenicity of the causal agent, Fo f.sp. lactucae, to find new leads to control this disease. The genomes of a large panel of isolates of different races will be sequenced and compared to identify candidate effector genes and to gain insight in the processes underlying the emergence of new races. The identified effector candidates will be functionally analysed. In Amsterdam, we are looking for an enthusiastic PhD candidate who will perform laboratory and greenhouse experiments to elucidate the function of individual effector genes in virulence of the pathogen and immunity of lettuce.
PhD position: Ecology and Genomics of Phyllosphere Yeasts, Wageningen
In this project, we will leverage our recently established âPhyllosphere Yeast Repositoryâ - an extensive collection of yeast isolates, genomes and metabolomes â to assess: (i) competition and cooperation in the phyllosphere, and (ii) the potential of yeasts to control phyllosphere pathogens. You will conduct laboratory and greenhouse experiments to investigate yeast-plant and yeast-pathogen interactions in the phyllosphere. To achieve this, you will adopt a combination of classical microbiology techniques (cultivation, microscopy), chemical analyses (gas chromatography), molecular biology (qPCR, metabarcoding, transcriptomics, yeast mutagenesis), plant bioassays, and a range of bioinformatics analyses (genome mining, comparative genomics, multi-omics integration).
Postdoctoral Fellow: Self-Developed Project, Oslo
With this competitive three-year postdoctoral fellowship, the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo (NHM), aims to bring in a talented researcher to enhance our strategic research environment.