🌻 TWiB August 29, 2022
This week there's some good news. We announced the new editors on Botany One. Michela's first story should be out tomorrow, on genetic imprinting. I'm hoping its the start of catching more genetics stories that I'd miss. I'm also hoping it'll mean I can take some time off soon.
I have been reminded today is a holiday in the UK, so I will be taking some time off botany today to watch the moon launch some time after 12:30 GMT - weather permitting. If you're interested it'll be on NASA TV.
After the lunar launch, I'll be back down to earth looking at the flora of coffin pillows, a use of botany that I'd never imagined. I'd like to get that story out by the end of the week.
Until next week, take care.
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
In Botany One
Fungi prepare the soil for plant invasions — botany.one Chinese researchers find that similar plants can gain a big competitive advantage by partnering with the right fungi.
Meet our new Science Editors : Michela and Guillaume — botany.one Welcome to two editors who will expand Botany One's horizons.
Crime Scene Botanics, the forensic side of botany — botany.one Planting Clues should not only appeal to the general reader, but will also serve well as a textbook for an undergraduate course on forensic botany.
Drought damages a plant's perfume — botany.one Bees may be using their sense of smell to detect and avoid stressed plants.
News & Views
Tracing the evolution of the aubergine — www.nhm.ac.uk Researchers are delving into the origin of the aubergine by sequencing its DNA.
New Phytologist profiles their new advisor.
Long-term study suggests climate-friendly practices could increase crop yields and improve farm ecosystems — globalplantcouncil.org An international team of researchers from 16 labs conducting a long-term study has found that climate-friendly farming practices could lead to higher crop yields, reduced costs and improved local ecosystems. In their paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability, the group describes 30 long-running farming experiments designed to improve farming practices in Europe (UK, Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, The Netherlands) and Africa (Zimbabwe, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania).
Applications Now Open For the 2022-2023 Plantae Fellows Program — plantae.org Are you a creative and articulate plant scientist looking to connect with other like-minded folks? We need your help to nurture and grow Plantae, the online home for the global plant science community that is powered by ASPB. We are looking for individuals who want to become highly engaged by creating and curating content, facilitating and hosting discussions, and otherwise fostering our growing global community.
WA ecosystems are changing. Conservation efforts are, too — crosscut.com The Natural Areas program is critical for preserving native biodiversity in the state, but climate change is challenging its future.
Up to 1 in 6 U.S. tree species threatened with extinction, study finds — www.washingtonpost.com Some 100 native tree species could die out amid an onslaught of invasive insects, a surge in deadly diseases and the all-encompassing peril of climate change
Potato-gene wrangler — www.nature.com Hugo Campos develops resilient, high-yield crop varieties to battle food insecurity.
How one mysterious tomato plant turned into Des Moines' first streetscape garden — www.desmoinesregister.com It was an abnormally cool and wet spring this year, perhaps a welcome relief for some, but not Lauren Kollauf, executive director of the Avenues of Ingersoll & Grand. She just wanted to get flowers in the planter beds on Ingersoll Avenue between 24th and 28th Street.
Meet the Woman Restoring Native American Peaches to the Southwest - Gastro Obscura — www.atlasobscura.com Searching for the precious trees has become Reagan Wytsalucy’s calling.
Peer-review crisis creates problems for journals and scholars — www.insidehighered.com The peer-review system, which relies on unpaid volunteers, has long been stressed. COVID-19 has made it worse. Possible solutions include paying reviewers or limiting revise-and-resubmits. Are these Band-Aids on structural problems?
Scientific Papers
Tropical tree species differ in damage and mortality from lightning — www.nature.com
Richards et al. measured differences in mortality among trees damaged by lightning and related those to damage frequency and tree functional traits. Eighteen of 30 focal species had lightning mortality rates that deviated from null expectations. Several species showed little damage and three species had no mortality from lightning, whereas palms were especially likely to die from strikes. Species that were most likely to be struck also showed the highest survival.
Smart reprograming of plants against salinity stress using modern biotechnological tools
Raza et al. highlight advances in modern biotechnological tools, such as omics (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) approaches and different genome editing tools (ZFN, TALEN, and CRISPR/Cas system) for improving salinity tolerance in plants and accomplish the goal of “zero hunger,” a worldwide sustainable development goal proposed by the FAO.
Mechanisms of woody-plant mortality under rising drought, CO2 and vapour pressure deficit — www.nature.com
McDowell et al. synthesize knowledge of drought-related tree mortality under a warming and drying atmosphere with rising atmospheric CO2. Drought-associated mortality results from water and carbon depletion and declines in their fluxes relative to demand by living tissues. These pools and fluxes are interdependent and underlay plant defences against biotic agents. Death via failure to maintain a positive water balance is particularly dependent on soil-to-root conductance, capacitance, vulnerability to hydraulic failure, cuticular water losses and dehydration tolerance, all of which could be exacerbated by reduced carbon supply rates to support cellular survival or the carbon starvation process.
ReadCube https://rdcu.be/cJ43y
Asteraceae as a model system for evolutionary studies: from fossils to genomes — academic.oup.com
Palazzesi et al. summarize recent progress in our understanding of Asteraceae on the basis of joint efforts by specialists in the fields of palaeobotany, cytogenetics, comparative genomics and phylogenomics.
Melatonin-mediated temperature stress tolerance in plants — www.tandfonline.com
Raza et al. highlight the critical role of Melatonin in plant production and tolerance against temperature stress. They have documented how Melatonin interacts with other molecules to alleviate temperature stress. Melatonin-mediated molecular breeding would be great potential in helping the adverse effects of temperature stress by creating transgenic plants.
Soil microbiomes and one health — www.nature.com
The concept of one health highlights that human health is not isolated but connected to the health of animals, plants and environments. Banjeree and van der Heijden demonstrate that soils are a cornerstone of one health and serve as a source and reservoir of pathogens, beneficial microorganisms and the overall microbial diversity in a wide range of organisms and ecosystems.
Modeling Global Carbon Costs of Plant Nitrogen and Phosphorus Acquisition
Most Earth system models (ESMs) do not explicitly represent the carbon (C) costs of plant nutrient acquisition, which leads to uncertainty in predictions of the current and future constraints to the land C sink. Braghiere et al. integrate a plant productivity-optimizing nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) acquisition model (fixation & uptake of nutrients, FUN) into the energy exascale Earth system (E3SM) land model (ELM).
FunAndes – A functional trait database of Andean plants — www.nature.com
Báez et al. introduce the FunAndes database, a compilation of functional trait data for the Andean flora spanning six countries. FunAndes contains data on 24 traits across 2,694 taxa, for a total of 105,466 entries. The database features plant-morphological attributes including growth form, and leaf, stem, and wood traits measured at the species or individual level, together with geographic metadata (i.e., coordinates and elevation).
Genome Sequencing of up to 6,000-Year-Old Citrullus Seeds Reveals Use of a Bitter-Fleshed Species Prior to Watermelon Domestication — academic.oup.com
Iconographic evidence from Egypt suggests that watermelon pulp was consumed there as a dessert by 4,360 BP. Earlier archaeobotanical evidence comes from seeds from Neolithic settlements in Libya, but whether these were watermelons with sweet pulp or other forms is unknown. PĂ©rez-Escobar et al. generated genome sequences from 6,000- and 3,300-year-old seeds from Libya and Sudan, and from worldwide herbarium collections made between 1824 and 2019, and analyzed these data together with resequenced genomes from important germplasm collections for a total of 131 accessions.
Extracellular pH sensing by plant cell-surface peptide-receptor complexes — www.cell.com
Liu et al. report that plant cell-surface peptide-receptor complexes can function as extracellular pH sensors. We found that pattern-triggered immunity (PTI) dramatically alkalinizes the acidic extracellular pH in root apical meristem (RAM) region, which is essential for root meristem growth factor 1 (RGF1)-mediated RAM growth.
Stomatal Development and Gene Expression in Rice Florets
Bertolino et al. characterise in detail the spatial distribution and development of the floral stomata of the indica rice variety IR64. They show that stomatal complexes are present at low density on specific areas of the lemma, palea and anthers, and are morphologically different compared to stomata found on leaves.
Rising CO2 and warming reduce global canopy demand for nitrogen
Nitrogen (N) limitation has been considered as a constraint on terrestrial carbon uptake in response to rising CO2 and climate change. By extension, it has been suggested that declining carboxylation capacity (Vcmax) and leaf N content in enhanced-CO2 experiments and satellite records signify increasing N limitation of primary production. Dong et al. predicted Vcmax using the coordination hypothesis and estimated changes in leaf-level photosynthetic N for 1982–2016 assuming proportionality with leaf-level Vcmax at 25°C.
Genome wide association study reveals plant loci controlling heritability of the rhizosphere microbiome — www.nature.com
Deng et al. conducted a population-level microbiome analysis of the rhizospheres of 200 sorghum genotypes. Using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, they identify rhizosphere-associated bacteria exhibiting heritable associations with plant genotype, and identify significant overlap between these lineages and heritable taxa recently identified in maize. Furthermore, they demonstrate that GWAS can identify host loci that correlate with the abundance of specific subsets of the rhizosphere microbiome.
Disintegration of the genus Prosopis L. (Leguminosae, Caesalpinioideae, mimosoid clade) — phytokeys.pensoft.net
Robust evidence from phylogenomic analyses of 997 nuclear genes has recently shown, beyond doubt, that the genus Prosopis is polyphyletic with three separate lineages, each with affinities to other genera of mimosoids: (i) Prosopis africana is an isolated lineage placed in the grade of Plathymenia, Newtonia and Fillaeopsis that subtends the core mimosoid clade; (ii) the remaining Old World species of Prosopis form a clade that is sister to the Indo-Nepalese monospecific genus Indopiptadenia and (iii) New World Prosopis has the Namibian / Namaqualand monospecific endemic genus Xerocladia nested within it. This means that it is now clear that maintaining the unity of the genus Prosopis sensu Burkart (1976) is no longer tenable. These three distinct lineages of Prosopis species correspond directly to Burkart’s (1976) sectional classification of the genus, to previously recognised genera and to the differences in types of armature that underpin Burkart’s sections. Hughes et al. address this non-monophyly by resurrecting three segregate genera – Anonychium, Neltuma and Strombocarpa and provide 57 new name combinations where necessary, while maintaining the morphologically distinctive and geographically isolated genera Xerocladia and Indopiptadenia. The genus Prosopis itself is reduced to just three species and an emended description is presented.
Is field-measured tree height as reliable as believed – A comparison study of tree height estimates from field measurement, airborne laser scanning and terrestrial laser scanning in a boreal forest Quantitative comparisons of tree height observations from different sources are scarce due to the difficulties in effective sampling. In this study, the reliability and robustness of tree height observations obtained via a conventional field inventory, airborne laser scanning (ALS) and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) were investigated.
Careers
Full professor in Botany with a focus on systematics, taxonomy, and plant geography. Do you want to lead the scientific work with botanical collections and biodiversity? We now offer a unique opportunity to develop the research at the Herbarium GB and Botanical Garden in Gothenburg.
Are you NordGen’s new Plant Senior Scientist? Do you want to work with conservation and utilization of agricultural biological diversity? Are you an experienced researcher within plant science, plant genetics or plant breeding with a passion for seeds and plants? If you in addition like networking and would appreciate an international and developing working environment, NordGen might be the right place for you - and right now, we are looking for an experienced plant Senior Scientist to join our enthusiastic team of plant senior scientists.
Research Geneticist In this position, you will be responsible for planning, initiating, coordinating, conducting, and publishing results of research within the assigned project under the broad area of genetic improvement of vegetable Brassica crops for economically important traits.
Recruitment Information for Project Researcher Research activities including field observations and data analysis in the Arctic ecosystem
Digitization Intern - All Asia
The Seasonal Exhibits Assistant assists with the data capture of herbarium specimens collected from Asia and the Malay Archipelago and housed in the New York Botanical Garden Steere Herbarium as part of a multi-institutional NSF-funded project: Digitization TCN: Bringing Asia to digital life: mobilizing underrepresented Asian herbarium collections in the US to propel biodiversity discovery.
Plant Molecular Biologist The Department of Plant Biology, Ecology, and Evolution at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater (http://plantbio.okstate.edu) seeks a tenure-track Assistant Professor to begin August 2023. The ideal candidate will address fundamental questions in Plant Molecular Biology; those who study metabolites or work in the context of systems biology are particularly encouraged to apply.
PhD Fully Funded Position in Plant Sciences at The University of Cologne in Germany PhD position polygenic adaptation and pleiotropy: We are looking for a PhD student in the group of Dr. Markus Stetter (Institute for Plant Sciences) for a collaborative project with the group of Prof. Joachim Krug (Institute for Biological Physics) on the roles of polygenic adaptation and pleiotropy in the evolution of plant populations under changing environments.
Plant Ecology/Evolutionary Biology Faculty As part of a multi-year hiring initiative, the Department of Ecology & Evolution at the University of Chicago is searching for faculty working in the ecology or evolutionary biology of plants, using either field-based or a combination of field, laboratory and conceptual/theoretical approaches. Areas include, but are not limited to, plant ecology, plant evolution, plant-animal or plant-pathogen interactions, plant responses and adaptations to global change, or plant contributions to ecosystem processes. Appointment as assistant professor is expected, but applicants for tenured ranks will be considered.
PhD on engineering plant circadian clocks for climate adaptation The lab of Prof. Devang Mehta (https://mehta-lab.com) conducts research in experimental plant systems biology in the Division of Crop Biotechnics (Department of Biosystems) at KU Leuven (Belgium). We have an open full-time PhD position in Bioscience Engineering to study and engineer the plant circadian clock for enhanced latitudinal adaptation due to climate change.
Postdoctoral Researcher in Developmental Genetics of Cereal Crops (f/m/d) The culturally diverse Research Group “Plant Architecture” is primarily interested in basic research questions concerning how cereal inflorescences, called spikes, develop and how this contributes to yield formation.
Scientific Communications & Outreach Officer Applications are invited for a Scientific Communications & Outreach Officer to join the Communications Team at the Earlham Institute, based in Norwich, UK.
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