October 23, 2023

🌻 The Week in Botany October 23, 2023

It’s the last week of summer time in the UK this week. Next weekend the clocks will move back and the evenings will plunge into darkness. If I remember correctly for the USA it’s a week later, so there’ll be chaos ahead for a week converting time zones. It also means I don’t know if the email will be with next week at the same time, earlier or later than usual. But - assuming the latest wave of COVID doesn’t get me - it will be with you around the same time next week. Until then, take care.

Alun (webmaster@botany.one)

On Botany One

Unearthing the Hidden History of Ancient Agave Cultivation in the Southwest US and Mexico
Until recently, archaeologists had only a few clues about the importance of agaves to Southwest US and northern Mexico. But new research has revealed a hidden history of agave domestication in this region.

The Delicate Chemistry of Attraction and Repulsion in Flower Scents
Floral scents play a delicate balancing act, appealing to pollinators while repelling herbivores.

The Choreography of Nature: How Plant-Pollinator Interactions Unfold in a Day
“From dawn’s first light to twilight’s embrace, every hour tells a new story about plants and pollinators.”

A guide to the flora of the Sierra San Pedro Mártir
Patrick Gibson reviews A Guide to the Flora of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir / Una Guía a la Flora de la Sierra de San Pedro Mártir by Alan Harper, Sula Vanderplank and Jon Rebman.

News & Views

Could superpowered plants be the heroes of the climate crisis?
Carbon-guzzling trees and crops, genetically altered to boost photosynthesis and store carbon in the roots, could absorb millions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Future Mars astronauts may chomp on Earth's tiniest flowering plant to survive
Watermeal exists in clumps no larger than a pinhead but could be an essential foodstuff and source of oxygen for humans in space.

Plants Revealed 'Talking' to Each Other About Insects in Video
Go out into any garden, park or forest and you will be surrounded by a silent cacophony of conversations. Conversations between plants.

‘I can leave my tears in the garden.’ A tiny flower farm offers a reprieve from cancer
Eight months after her husband, Chad, was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, Stacie Vanags planted 1,100 flower seeds in her Ventura backyard.

Hāwera gardeners' gift of 2000 plants for cyclone-struck Hawke's Bay
Imagining what a cyclone would do to her beloved Hāwera garden prompted Taranaki Fringe Garden Festival stalwart Bernie Christian’s mission to help gardeners in Hawke’s Bay after Cyclone Gabrielle hit in February.

What Kind of Year Has It Been for Gardeners? An Aggravating One.
From spongy moth caterpillars to torrential rains, this garden season has been plagued by one challenge after another.

‘Let’s see what we can do’: the market garden in a rewilding project
The tenants at Pentwyn, on land bought by Radnorshire Wildlife Trust, plan to produce plenty of food for local people.

The trees arrived with Polynesian voyagers. After Maui wildfire, there’s a chance to restore them
For people around the world, the green leaves that sprouted from a scorched, 150-year-old banyan tree in the heart of devastated Lahaina symbolized hope following Maui’s deadly wildfire this summer. Teams rushed to flood its roots with water, hoping to save a magnificent tree that had provided shade for community events, a picturesque wedding venue and a popular backdrop for posing tourists.

Under a temporary mining ban, 4 rare plant species can bloom in San Bernardino forest
Four threatened and endangered plant species growing in the San Bernardino National Forest will have an opportunity to thrive following the adoption of a plan this week by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service that temporarily bans new limestone mining.

Toxic workplaces are the main reason women leave academic jobs
Women feel driven out by problems with workplace culture more often than by lack of work–life balance.

Women faculty feel ‘pushed’ from academia by poor workplace climate
When biogeochemist Rebecca Barnes landed a tenure-track position at Colorado College, she thought it was her dream job. And she seemed to excel in the role. She received multiple large grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), including a prestigious CAREER grant—in all, more than $8 million in funding after obtaining her Ph.D. She published 15 papers in 2019 alone, the year before she was awarded tenure. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m doing all the things right. I’m achieving. Like, isn’t that the point?’”

Do Adult Periodical Cicadas Actually Eat?
Every so often, cicadas emerge above ground and blanket the earth with their exoskeletons while emitting a high-pitched chirp from sunrise to sunset. The periodical cicadas in the genus Magicicada come every 13 or 17 years, though other types of cicadas emerge much more frequently in our neighborhoods. A long-standing agricultural query related to the periodical cicadas was recently answered by an Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) research team at West Virginia’s Appalachian Fruit Research Station. Simply: Once periodical cicadas emerge, do they actually feed on vegetation?

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Scientific Papers

Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty (OA)
Women remain underrepresented among faculty in nearly all academic fields. Using a census of 245,270 tenure-track and tenured professors at United States–based PhD-granting departments, Spoon et al. show that women leave academia overall at higher rates than men at every career age, in large part because of strongly gendered attrition at lower-prestige institutions, in non-STEM fields, and among tenured faculty.

rWCVP: a companion R package for the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (OA)
Brown et al. present rWCVP, an open-source R package that aims to facilitate the use of the WCVP by providing clear, intuitive functions to execute many common tasks. These functions include taxonomic name reconciliation, geospatial integration, mapping and generation of multiple different summaries of the WCVP in both data and report format.

Phenotyping for waterlogging tolerance in crops: current trends and future prospects (OA)
Despite the extensive work that has been carried out examining the molecular and physiological responses to waterlogging, phenotyping for waterlogging tolerance has proven difficult. This difficulty is largely due to the high variability of waterlogging conditions such as duration, temperature, soil type, and growth stage of the crop. In this review, Langan et al. highlight use of phenotyping to assess and improve waterlogging tolerance in temperate crop species.

The exception to the rule? TORC1 triggers growth under low nutrient environments ($)
Eukaryotic cells' proliferation and growth are controlled by the target of rapamycin kinase (TOR). TOR usually activates in favorable energy and nutritional circumstances. This is challenged by recent research, suggesting that plant cells optimized for nutrient absorption in low nutritional conditions may activate the TOR pathway in a polarized manner.

Amyloplast sedimentation repolarizes LAZYs to achieve gravity sensing in plants ($)
Chen et al. report that gravistimulation by reorientation triggers mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling-mediated phosphorylation of Arabidopsis LAZY proteins basally polarized in root columella cells. Phosphorylation of LAZY increases its interaction with several translocons at the outer envelope membrane of chloroplasts (TOC) proteins on the surface of amyloplasts, facilitating enrichment of LAZY proteins on amyloplasts.

Spiny but photogenic: Amateur sightings complement herbarium specimens to reveal the bioregions of cacti ($)
Cacti are characteristic elements of the Neotropical flora and of major interest for biogeographic, evolutionary, and ecological studies. Calvente et al. tested global biogeographic boundaries for Neotropical Cactaceae using specimen-based occurrences, coupled with data from visual observations, as a means to tackle the known collection biases in the family.

Rhizosphere engineering for soil carbon sequestration ($)
The plasticity of plants offers possibilities to engineer the rhizosphere to mitigate climate change. Wang & Kuzyakov define rhizosphere engineering as targeted manipulation of plants, soil, microorganisms, and management to shift rhizosphere processes for specific aims [e.g., carbon (C) sequestration].

Tunable recurrent priming of lateral roots in Arabidopsis: More than just a clock? ($)
Reyes-Hernández & Maizel review the recent experimental and modelling approaches to understand the molecular processes underlying the recurring lateral root formation. They argue that the intermittent priming of lateral roots results from interweaving the pattern of auxin flow and root growth together with an oscillatory auxin-modulated transcriptional mechanism and illustrate its long-range sugar-mediated tuning by light.

Metatranscriptomics reveals diversity of symbiotic interaction and mechanisms of carbon exchange in the marine cyanolichen Lichina pygmaea (OA)
Lichens are exemplar symbioses based upon carbon exchange between photobionts and their mycobiont hosts. Historically considered a two-way relationship, some lichen symbioses have been shown to contain multiple photobiont partners; however, the way in which these photobiont communities react to environmental change is poorly understood.

Ralstonia solanacearum pandemic lineage strain UW551 overcomes inhibitory xylem chemistry to break tomato bacterial wilt resistance (OA)
Plant-pathogenic Ralstonia strains cause bacterial wilt disease by colonizing xylem vessels of many crops, including tomato. Host resistance is the best control for bacterial wilt, but resistance mechanisms of the widely used Hawaii 7996 tomato breeding line (H7996) are unknown. Using growth in ex vivo xylem sap as a proxy for host xylem, Hamilton et al. found that Ralstonia strain GMI1000 grows in sap from both healthy plants and Ralstonia-infected susceptible plants.

Linking water use efficiency with water use strategy from leaves to communities (OA)
This insight provides updated and simplified ways of estimating the marginal water cost of carbon gain and adds depth to understanding ways that plants balance water expenditure against carbon gain, uniquely providing a mechanistic means of predicting water use characteristics under changing environmental scenarios.

Jasmonates, gibberellins, and powdery mildew modify cell cycle progression and evoke differential spatiotemporal responses along the barley leaf (OA)
Barley (Hordeum vulgare) is an important cereal crop, and its development, defence, and stress responses are modulated by different hormones including jasmonates (JAs) and the antagonistic gibberellins (GAs). Barley productivity is severely affected by the foliar biotrophic fungal pathogen Blumeria hordei. In this study, primary leaves were used to examine the molecular processes regulating responses to methyl-jasmonate (MeJA) and GA to B. hordei infection along the leaf axis.

Careers

PhD Student Position in Fungal Cell and Fungal Network Biology, Amsterdam
Are you looking for a PhD position at the intersection between mycology, fluorescence microscopy and technology development? Do you enjoy developing new methods and to perform quantitative biology and data analysis? The Kokkoris group (A-LIFE, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands) is accepting applications for a 4 years fully-funded PhD position. Applicants must have a basic understanding of fungal biology and must be experienced with fungal cultivation, basic microscopy, data analysis and programming (e.g., R, Python or/and MATLAB). The PhD position will ideally start January 2024.

Assistant Professor (Tenure Track): Plant Light Signaling, Wageningen
Are you passionate about understanding the molecular biology of plant-light interactions? Do you have the drive to break new ground and shape the future of research in plant-light signaling? Are you dedicated to educating, supervising, and molding the next wave of scientists in this field? If yes, then we may have the perfect opportunity for you!

Under pressure: Investigating the turgor-sensing complex of the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae, PhD, Norwich
This project will investigate the control of turgor generation by Magnaporthe. We will investigate how a turgor-sensing complex operates and determines when sufficient pressure has been generated in the cell. Using a new molecular mechanosensor we aim to define how a turgor-sensing kinase called Sln1 is able to precisely control turgor generation and re-polarisation of the appressorium.

Soil Microbiology Group Leader, Norwich
The John Innes Centre (JIC) is looking for microbiologists interested in understanding how bacteria or fungi impact soil and plant health, such as the role of microbes in nitrogen cycling and climate change, microbial communication, competition and development in the soil, or the soil microbiome and its influence on and interaction with plants. Scientists working on, or interested in working on, microbiome formation in crop plants such as wheat, barley and pea are particularly encouraged to apply given the genetic resources and plant growth facilities available at JIC.

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Plant Comparative Genomics & Phylogenomics, Durham, UK
Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Plant comparative genomics and phylogenomics. The project focuses on the impact of mutualism breakdown on the genome, using the ant-plant symbiotic clade Hydnophytinae (Rubiaceae). The Hydnophytinae contain 105 epiphytic plant species in Australasia, and involve plants with several levels of mutualistic dependence on ants: facultative species inhabited by generalist arboreal ants, obligate species depending on one or two specialized ant species, and species that have secondarily lost the association with ants. The Hydnophytinae offers unma! tched evo lutionary replication for studying mutualism breakdown due to its abundant breakdown events relative to clade size. The project, funded by ERC/UKRI, is led by Professor Guillaume Chomicki and will investigate the consequences of mutualism breakdown, using Hydnophytinae as a model system.

PhD Studentship: Exploring Nature’s Pharmacy for Pollinator Health, London
Previous work in our research groups showed that secondary chemicals produced by heather (Calluna) and lime trees (Tilia) can prevent and control parasitic infection in an important pollinator, the buff-tailed bumble bee (Bombus terrestris). This, together with other studies suggests that plants may have evolved to act as a natural pharmacy for their insect pollinators. This PhD studentship will test this hypothesis through a suite of laboratory and field experiments with a taxonomically broad array of insect pollinator species. You will design experiments to test whether the benefits of antiparasitic nectar compounds can be extrapolated from B. terrestris to the broader pollinator community.

Biodiversity Manager, Durham, UK
As Biodiversity Manager, you will be responsible for the planning, delivery and monitoring of our Biodiversity Strategy 2022/32, as instructed by the Senior Maintenance Services Manger, with input from the Senior Energy and Sustainability Manager and the Biodiversity Delivery Group.

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Edinburgh
We are looking for a Post-Doctoral Research Associate to study the origin and evolution of apical growth in land plants in the group of Dr Sandy Hetherington (The Molecular Palaeobotany and Evolution Group) in the Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences.

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Edinburgh
We are looking for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in plant synthetic biology plant and/or plant physiology to enhance photosynthesis through introduction of a pyrenoid-based CO2-concentrating mechanism.

Advanced Post-Doctoral Scientist / Research Scientist, California
Under the general direction of the Principal Investigator under the NASA ARC-CREST Cooperative Agreement, the Research Scientist is responsible for conducting scientific research, processing and analyzing UAV and satellite data, publishing scientific papers, and developing proposals for new research activities. Project focus areas include: remote sensing of agricultural lands, with an emphasis on plant pathogens in strawberries, lettuce and developing satellite-based applications to support on-farm management and water conservation programs. The main objectives of the research project are to apply data from remote sensing instruments on UAVs and satellites in combination with field data to identify the presence of plant pathogens and develop models to improve forecasts of crop yields, and to conduct analyses to identify effective water conservation strategies and demand management programs at scale.