đ± TWiB May 31, 2021
Welcome to the latest Week in Botany compiled from stories shared by people following @BotanyOne on Twitter. It's been a week where nothing major has gone wrong, but it seems that every single minor issue that takes half an hour to fix has.
It's a good sign that I'm in need of a break, so next weekend I plan to take Friday off. I'll be returning to Wales to visit my parents for the first time since Covid struck. For you, it means that next week's newsletter might arrive a little later than usual.
Until then, take care.
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
In Botany One
The secret to a good clover crop isn't luck, it's timing â www.botany.one Season variability is a major driver of clover architecture and biomass development.
A warming climate will change plants' responses to herbivores in different ways Invasive species might not always have the upper hand when temperatures rise.
Keeping plants off-balance in one location can give a species greater stability Throwing varying climatic conditions at plant populations can help preserve genetic diversity in a species.
Botanists find the molecular difference between edible pacaya and the wild palms Hanene Hosni and colleagues examined how the domesticated pacaya palm differed from wild palms.
Plants' plan preserves people and planet
Nigel Chaffey reviews The Nation of Plants, by Stefano Mancuso
News & Views
Yuan Longping, Plant Scientist Who Helped Curb Famine, Dies at 90 â www.nytimes.com His development of high-yield rice hybrids in the 1970s led to steeply rising harvests in Asia and Africa and made him a national hero in China, credited with saving countless lives.
The Evolution of a ggplot (Ep. 1) - CĂ©dric Scherer
"In this series of blog posts, I aim to show you how to turn a default ggplot into a plot that visualizes information in an appealing and easily understandable way."
âZombieâ fires in Alaska and Canada may be becoming more common In the northern hemisphere, âzombieâ forest fires that burn in the summer then smoulder over winter and reignite in spring may be becoming more common. A model suggests they are associated with warmer summers, which are happening more often as the climate warms.
Magnolia Grandiflora â Brooklyn, New York A century-old magnolia tree is the only living landmark tree in New York City.Â
Madagascar's vanishing trees â news.mongabay.com Madagascar has a documented 2,900 endemic species of trees, but a new report shows that almost two-thirds of them are in danger of disappearing.
The Quiet Rescue of Americaâs Forgotten Fruit One man is responsible for roughly half of the countryâs stone fruit collection.
Ancient seeds spill secrets about the evolution of flowering plants The origin and rapid diversification of flowering plants is a long-standing âabominable mysteryâ, as Charles Darwin put it. Part of the puzzle â the origin of the protective covering of flowering-plant seeds â is nearing resolution.
What Climate Science Loses Without Enough Black Researchers With calls to address racism echoing around the profession, scientists are remaking institutions that have excluded people of color. Â
Planting for Pollinators Native pollinators are facing growing threats. Here are some fun and easy ways you can help them!
The Time Has Come to Rein In the Global Scourge of Palm Oil The cultivation of palm oil, found in roughly half of U.S. grocery products, has devastated tropical ecosystems, released vast amounts of C02 into the atmosphere, and impoverished rural communities. But efforts are underway that could curb the abuses of this powerful industry.
Scientific Papers
The wheat Seven in absentia gene is associated with increases in biomass and yield in hot climates
Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) productivity is severely reduced by high temperatures. Breeding of heat-tolerant cultivars can be achieved by identifying genes controlling physiological and agronomical traits when high temperatures occur and using these to select superior genotypes, but no gene underlying genetic variation for heat tolerance has previously been described. Thomelin et al. advanced the positional cloning of qYDH.3BL, a quantitative trait locus (QTL) on bread wheat chromosome 3B associated with increased yield in hot and dry climates.
In response to touch, some carnivorous plants such as the Venus flytrap have evolved spectacular movements to capture animals for nutrient acquisition. However, the molecules that confer this sensitivity remain unknown. Procko et al. used comparative transcriptomics to show that expression of three genes encoding homologs of the MscS-Like (MSL) and OSCA/TMEM63 family of mechanosensitive ion channels are localized to touch-sensitive trigger hairs of Venus flytrap.
Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones
Serra-Garcia and Gneezy use publicly available data to show that published papers in top psychology, economics, and general interest journals that fail to replicate are cited more than those that replicate. This difference in citation does not change after the publication of the failure to replicate.
âAs if they discovered it by the scentâ: improving our understanding of the chemical ecology, evolution, and genetics of floral scent and its role in pollination We have known for millennia that insects can smell and that this sense may play a role in their pollination of flowering plants.
Kehelpannala et al. leveraged a robust pipeline that they previously established to extract and analyze lipid profiles of different tissues and developmental stages from the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.
Evolutionarily conserved hierarchical gene regulatory networks for plant salt stress response
To understand how such gene regulatory networks (GRNs) have stabilized evolutionarily while allowing for species-specific responses, Wu et al. compare the GRNs underlying salt response in the early-diverging and late-diverging plants Marchantia polymorpha and Arabidopsis thaliana.
Methane (CH4) exchange in tree stems and canopies and the processes involved are among the least understood components of the global CH4 cycle. Recent studies have focused on quantifying tree stems as sources of CH4 and understanding abiotic CH4 emissions in plant canopies, with the role of microbial in situ CH4 formation receiving less attention. Moreover, despite initial reports revealing CH4 consumption, studies have not adequately evaluated the potential of microbial CH4 oxidation within trees. In this paper, Putkinen et al. discuss the current level of understanding on these processes
Molecular insights into plant desiccation tolerance: transcriptomics, proteomics and targeted metabolite profiling in Craterostigma plantagineum The resurrection plant Craterostigma plantagineum possesses an extraordinary capacity to survive long-term desiccation. To enhance our understanding of this phenomenon, complementary transcriptome, soluble proteome and targeted metabolite profiling was carried out on leaves collected from different stages during a dehydration and rehydration cycle.
Ojeda et al. studied the functional relationship of NTRC and 2-Cys Prxs by a comparative analysis of the triple Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) mutant, ntrc-2cpab, which lacks NTRC and 2-Cys Prxs, and the double mutant 2cpab, which lacks 2-Cys Prxs.
Growthâdefense tradeâoffs and yield loss in plants with engineered cell walls discuss recent data on transcriptional reprogramming in plants with modified lignin content and their corresponding suppressor mutants, and evaluate growth-defense trade-offs as a factor underlying the growth phenotypes.
Careers
Independent Junior Group Leader The Center for Plant Molecular Biology (ZMBP) at the University of TĂŒbingen invites applications for an Independent Junior Group Leader position. The ZMBP comprises 17 research groups and central facilities with nearly 200 staff members. The successful candidate will be expected to establish a competitive research program in the scientific area of Molecular Plant Biology
Assistant Professor-Crop Plant Physiologist The Department of Crop and Soil Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State University is seeking an Assistant Professor of Crop Plant Physiology. This faculty position will be a 12-month, tenure-track position.
Head, Dept. of Horticulture & Landscape Architecture Colorado State University invites applications for the position of Professor and Head of the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture (HLA). This is a 12-month tenured position appointment focused on programmatic and administrative leadership in scholarship, instruction, extension and stakeholder engagement.
Privacy Policy
We store your email in order to know who to send the emails to. We have to share that list with Revue because theyâre the company that actually sends the emails out. We get information about how many emails open, so it might be 50% one week, but we wouldnât be able to tell if you were in the half that opens the email or the half that didnât. Revue have their own longer privacy policy.
The email is funded by the Annals of Botany Company.