đ TWiB December 20, 2021
Welcome to the last issue of The Week in Botany for this year. It has been a difficult year, but it's been a huge help being able to follow everything shared on social media. This week I'd missed the story of the plant virus that causes aphids to grow wings faster.
As it's been a long year, I'll be taking a break from December 24 to January 4, so there'll be no newsletter till January 10. In the meantime, there will still be messages from @BotanyOne on Twitter, including job notices.
If you celebrate Christmas, have a good one. Those of us who don't can still try to get a break before the end of the year. Until next year, take care.
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
In Botany One
Increasing the copies of genes increases the ecological niche that nettles can thrive in â www.botany.one Botanists find it's easier to find the gene to cope with a problem if you carry more copies of genes.
Climate change will hit peat bogs not so much from greater heat but from the reduced precipitation that comes with the heat â www.botany.one Climate change is about more than simply warming, and these other effects should not be overlooked.
Most plants come from seeds. What does this mean for us? â www.botany.one Adult plants provide sustenance, sequester carbon and help keep healthy soils. But what is the role of seeds?
When foraging for pollen from flowers, timing can be crucial â www.botany.one By timing their visits to twilight, just as nocturnal flowers are opening, some bees can grab most of Pseudobombax longiflorum's pollen.
Botanists develop a model for times when a plant thriving in a garden is a matter of life and death â www.botany.one A new model can help botanic gardens discover where they should source endangered plants when they want to aid conservation efforts.
News & Views
âAs Obsolete as some Better Thingsâ: Mistletoe⌠Mistletoe has held symbolic significance since ancient times, and has come to be synonymous with Christmas. Thus this time of year provides the perfect excuse to nose through our library, archive and specimens, and use this Christmassy species to illuminate our collections and some of the people connected with them
Access and equity around biodiversity data is at the forefront of international negotiations â alliancebioversityciat.org Ahead of critical meetings in 2022 which may determine the fate of global treaties on the governance of biodiversity and genetic resources, scientists have published a series of peer-reviewed research, review, and opinion articles examining the importance of, and challenges to, sharing and using data critical to global food security and biodiversity conservation.
Online research resources As the nights are long, and the weather often not conducive to spending long stretches in the garden, now is a good time to get lost in a little plant research.
Mother Mangrove: The Women Behind Kenyaâs Mangrove Restoration â www.nature.org You might have to look closely at the mud to see the thin, green propagules sticking through the ground. Women in multicolored hijabs and kangas are leaning over, tending to these precious seeds and saplings. After a couple of years, they will grow to become full-sized mangrove trees, with root structures visible both above and below the water's surface.
On authorship â Always seek your co-authors approval before submission Authorship is the principal currency of academia. Authorship issues should be treated with responsibility and transparency.
The Smithsonian cares for thousands of poinsettiasâmeet some of our favorites â www.si.edu Too many poinsettias? No such thing. Smithsonian Gardens regularly grows more than 20 different varieties of poinsettias at their greenhousesâthis can include close to 4,500 total cuttings across 2,000 pots.
New Plant Species Discovered by the Garden in 2021 Each year, the Missouri Botanical Gardenâs Science and Conservation staff discover and name about 200 plant species new to science. Thatâs roughly 10 percent of all plant species discovered by scientists worldwide annually.
GABA-enriched tomato is first CRISPR-edited food to enter market Sanatech Seedâs Sicilian Rouge CRISPR-edited âhealth-promotingâ tomatoes reach consumers and may open the market to more genome-edited fruit, vegetables and even fish.
Insects: how farmers can be better engaged in species conservation While farmers have the capacity to drive species conservation worldwide, their true potential is yet to be fully realised. An international team of researchers led by the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) shows how this can change in a new study published in the scientific journal "Global Ecology and Conservation".
Bucket brigades and proton gates: Researchers shed new light on waterâs role in photosynthesis â globalplantcouncil.org A better understanding of this process could inform the next generation of artificial photosynthetic systems that produce clean and renewable energy.Â
Scientific Papers
Corybas papillatus (Orchidaceae), a new orchid species from peninsular Thailand â phytokeys.pensoft.net A new species, Corybas papillatus, is described and illustrated from peninsular Thailand. The new species is easily recognized through a combination of the following characters: the purplish flower, the rounded apex of the dorsal sepal, the outer surface of dorsal sepal covered with irregular papillae in the upper half, the lateral sepals adnate laterally at the base to the connate petals, the V-shaped throat, the labellum bearing short hairs, dentate to erose labellum margins, and well-developed conical spurs. A key to the species of Corybas in Thailand is presented.
A plant virus satellite RNA directly accelerates wing formation in its insect vector for spread â www.nature.com
Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) often accompanies a short RNA molecule called a satellite RNA (satRNA). When infected with CMV in the presence of Y-satellite RNA (Y-sat), tobacco leaves develop a green mosaic, then turn yellow. Y-sat has been identified in the fields in Japan. Jayasinghe et al. show that the yellow leaf colour preferentially attracts aphids, and that the aphids fed on yellow plants, which harbour Y-sat-derived small RNAs (sRNAs), turn red and subsequently develop wings. In addition, they found that leaf yellowing did not necessarily reduce photosynthesis, and that viral transmission was not greatly affected despite the low viral titer in the Y-sat-infected plants
Bedoya and Olmstead aimed to assess the number of historical records of Marathrum in Colombia, the country where the genus was first collected and where mountain ranges have been found to constitute a barrier to gene flow across populations. They expand past records with new records for the genus in Colombia and find that Marathrum are not uncommon in river-rapids and waterfalls in the country, but their under-representation in herbaria respond to several collection biases.
Mendelian Randomisation (MR), an increasingly popular method that estimates the causal effects of risk factors on complex human traits, has seen several extensions that relax its basic assumptions. However, most of these extensions suffer from two major limitations; their under-exploitation of genome-wide markers, and sensitivity to the presence of a heritable confounder of the exposure-outcome relationship. To overcome these limitations, Darrous et al. propose a Latent Heritable Confounder MR (LHC-MR) method applicable to association summary statistics, which estimates bi-directional causal effects, direct heritability, and confounder effects while accounting for sample overlap.
Toward synthetic plant development
Brophy highlights the central role of auxin in plant development and the synthetic biology approaches that could be used to turn auxin-response regulators into powerful tools for modifying plant form. She hypothesizes that recoded, gain-of-function auxin response proteins combined with synthetic regulation could be used to override endogenous auxin signaling and control plant structure.
The recent success of FCM for C-value estimation using spores provides a much more convenient method of utilizing âdryâ refrigerated materials. Kuo et al. demonstrate here that herbarium spores of some ferns are also promising for this use, even for older specimens.
Rapid evolution of post-zygotic reproductive isolation is widespread in Arctic plant lineages
Gustafsson et al. show that post-zygotic reproductive isolation has developed multiple times within taxonomically recognized Arctic species belonging to several distantly related lineages, and that reproductive isolation may have developed over just a few millennia. Rapid and widespread evolution of incipient biological species in the Arctic flora might be associated with frequent bottlenecks due to glacial cycles, and/or selfing mating systems, which are common in the harsh Arctic environment where pollinators are scarce.
Mora et al. sampled butterfly communities in the Picos de Europa National Park (Spain), a region which is undergoing a process of rural abandonment. 19 hay meadows with different periods of abandonment were studied (long-term 18Â years or mid-term abandoned, 3â7Â years) and compared to meadows continuously managed in a traditional way. They examined how local meadow characteristics and landscape variables affected butterfly community response to abandonment.
Is the Nagoya Protocol designed to conserve biodiversity? â nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com We have entered a monumental era in terms of realizing the impact of biodiversity loss on our everyday lives. We suffer from the consequences of biodiversity loss due to overexploitation of natural resources as we continue failing to restore biodiversity. One of the major consequences of biodiversity loss is the emergence of global pandemics. We are in urgent need of realizing the full potential of all of the international legal instruments on creating incentives for biodiversity conservation. Access and benefit-sharing or ABS is an international legal framework implemented with the hopes that it would provide such incentives. Therefore, a legal analysis on whether ABS is designed to achieve biodiversity conservation is of crucial importance in achieving international conservation targets.
Widespread homogenization of plant communities in the Anthropocene â www.nature.com
Native biodiversity decline and non-native species spread are major features of the Anthropocene. Both processes can drive biotic homogenization by reducing trait and phylogenetic differences in species assemblages between regions, thus diminishing the regional distinctiveness of biotas and likely have negative impacts on key ecosystem functions. However, a global assessment of this phenomenon is lacking. Using a dataset of >200,000 plant species, Daru et al. demonstrate widespread and temporal decreases in species and phylogenetic turnover across grain sizes and spatial extents.
Careers
Doctoral student in Natural Science, specializing in Biology The main task is to conduct the PhD thesis work under supervision, which includes development of the PhD studentâs methodological experience, analytical skills, as well as theoretical depth and breadth. Techniques used within the project include sequence analyses, molecular biology (PCR, Q-RT-PCR, gene cloning, western blotting), photosynthesis-specific (chlorophyll fluorescence, carbon fixation, proton-motive force) and plant physiology-related (response to light stress) to characterize the ion transporters. The project will be conducted mostly as laborative studies. Specific research topics associated with the project include chloroplast ion transporters, photosynthesis and light stress in plants and algae.
Postdoc The post-doc will be hosted in Montpellier (France) by the CESAB. The job holder will be under the supervision of Eric Tabacchi (CNRS, Toulouse) and Guillaume Fried (Anses, Montpellier) and will benefit from the expertise of all project members (8 persons from 6 countries with specialists in botany, land use planning, invasive species and functional ecology) and from the methodological and logistic support of the CESAB.
PhD Dynamic growth conditions in vertical farms to improve sustainability Are you that researcher that likes to study dynamic variations in growth conditions to improve sustainability of fresh vegetable production in vertical farms?
Postdoctoral positions in the genetics of crop climate adaptation
Three postdoctoral positions are available at the University of California Davis, as part of projects funded by the Gates Foundation and the Foundation for Food & Agriculture, to accelerate the discovery of climate-adaptive alleles from the worldâs crop germplasm collections.
PhD candidate (m/f/d) in the molecular biosciences The Department of Molecular Signal Processing invites applications to fill the position of a PhD candidate (m/f/d) in the molecular biosciences with a focus on early signalling events in in plant root endosymbioses.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology - Field Ecology The Department of Biology at Oberlin College invites applications for a full-time non-continuing faculty position in the College of Arts and Sciences. Appointment to this position will be for a term of one year, beginning fall 2022, and will carry the rank of Visiting Assistant Professor.
Botany - Assistant Professor The appointed candidate will be expected to teach at all three levels of the curriculum, supervise graduate students, be active in research, publishing, and knowledge dissemination, and contribute to the academic and administrative life of the University.
Herbarium Assistant I - Full-time The Herbarium of The Morton Arboretum (MOR) is recruiting a full time Herbarium Assistant. We seek applicants with botanical and herbarium experience who are interested in supporting museum-based biodiversity research at the Arboretum and beyond
Curation and Digitisation Assistant (Fixed Term) The Department of Plant Sciences is seeking to appoint a Curation and Digitisation Assistant in the University Herbarium. The post is available full-time but we also welcome applications from those wishing to work part-time.
Supervisory Research Ecologist (Rangelands) Build a research program that aims to quantify and predict how multiple stressors (e.g., climate change, wildfire, disturbance from large herbivores such as cattle and feral equids, ecological drought) and land management practices cumulatively drive change among rangeland ecosystem states at management-relevant scales.
IMPRS and PhD We are now inviting applications for PhD positions starting in second half of 2022. Find out how to apply @ IMPRS Application Apply by 23 January 2022, midnight CET.
Senior Research Leader - Fungal Diversity & Systematics We are seeking a highly motivated scientist to lead fungal systematics research in Accelerated Taxonomy, one of five Priorities in the Science Directorate. Working with Kewâs Fungarium of c. 1.25 million mycological specimens, you will lead the Fungal Diversity & Systematics team and pursue your own research programme aligned closely to our ambitious strategy for Kew Science and Kewâs Manifesto For Change.
Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences We are seeking to appoint three new academics at the level of either lecturer or senior lecturer. The successful applicants will complement the long-standing research strengths of the School.  We are interested in applicants who will build internationally outstanding research programmes in the following areas: Evolution in a changing environment; Plant molecular mechanisms underpinning sustainable agriculture or horticulture; Links between genotype / phenotype and ecosystems; Understanding and reversing the biodiversity crisis; Predictive ecology; Restoration ecology; Threats to biodiversity from emerging diseases; The behavioural, sensory and genomic impacts of anthropogenic disturbance; Bioinspired and bioengineering applications. Applications from candidates engaged in or developing industrial partnerships in any of these areas are particularly encouraged.
The Garden Club Of America (GCA) Board Of Associates Centennial Pollinator Fellowship The Garden Club of America (GCA) Board of Associates Centennial Pollinator Fellowship provides funding to a current graduate student to study the causes of pollinator decline, in particular bees, bats, butterflies and moths, which could lead to potential solutions for their conservation and sustainability. The selection criteria are based on the technical merit of the proposed work and the degree to which the work is relevant to this objective
Postdoc Opening - Cryptic Algal Species I am seeking an innovative Postdoctoral Research Associate to conduct research on cryptic coralline algae, contributing to our understanding of cryptic speciation and functional ecology (www.marecology.com). The Postdoctoral Research Associate will lead seasonal fieldwork in Washington State, with opportunities for additional fieldwork in northern California and northern France.
Research Biologist/Plant Pathologist/Microbiologist The incumbent serves as a Research Biologist/Microbiologist/Plant Pathologist in the Mycotoxin Prevention and Applied Microbiology (MPM) Research Unit, National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research (NCAUR), Peoria, Illinois. MPM scientists conduct interdisciplinary research in chemistry, microbiology, genetics and plant biology to produce information and technologies needed to enhance food safety and crop production in the U.S. and around the world.
Senior Technician â Terrestrial Ecology The successful candidate will take on a varied role contributing to field and laboratory research management and planning, and supporting teaching and postgraduate study, with a focus on terrestrial ecology. You will enjoy working collaboratively and be skilled in communicating in writing and verbally with staff and students. You will also be able to work independently, have strong resilience, attention to detail combined with sound judgment skills and a strong focus on achieving solutions.
Postdoctoral Positions on Nitrogen Fixation on Maize and Sorghum Aerial Roots Two postdoctoral positions are available in Dr. Jean-Michel AnĂŠâs laboratory in the departments of Bacteriology and Agronomy at the University of Wisconsin â Madison.  The two postdoctoral researchers will be part of an interdisciplinary team studying nitrogen fixation in the mucilage produced by maize and sorghum aerial roots.
James McCune Smith PhD Scholarships The James McCune Smith Scholarships will fund Black UK students to undertake PhD research at the University, and will provide an enhanced experience through external mentors, placements, leadership training, community-building activities and networking opportunities.
PhD position to study regulation and transport of a novel anti-diabetic plant derived metabolite The plant metabolite montbretin A (MbA) is being developed as a novel therapeutic for diabetes and obesity. To overcome the MbA supply issues, this PhD projects aims at understanding MbA regulation and transport in the native plant and aims to use this knowledge in a synthetic biology approach towards improvement of engineered heterologous MbA production systems.
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