đ» TWiB November 14, 2022
This week has mainly been spent programming to prepare for a post-Twitter future. Things are falling into place, and we should have something ready by Sunday. My natural caution still means I'm unwilling to specify exactly which Sunday, because things can catch you by surprise.
One example is that as I compiled this email, I suddenly remembered that Revue, the company that sends the email to you, is owned by Twitter. There's a small but non-zero chance that the company might collapse within a few months, and some systems may evaporate sooner. The best time to deal with this is a few months before Revue is shut down, rather than five minutes after, so I will be looking into changing the email host again. This time it will probably be Substack, so things will might look different next week. Timing is important, so that people who unsubscribe don't find they're now subscribed to the list from another server.
Talking of the possible end of Twitter, I know some of you are planning to leave Twitter for other services. I mention Mastodon below, which is dividing opinion between those who like it and those who find it baffling. Not everyone is going there though, so I'm also setting up links to Tumblr, Reddit and maybe even LinkedIn.
Until next week, wherever the email comes from, take care,
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
Mastodon Servers for Science
Mastodon is the Twitter alternative people are talking about, though one of the better descriptions I've seen is that it's an anti-viral network. That means while it superficially looks like Twitter, some assumptions on how social media works don't hold. A big difference is there's no algorithm pushing content and adverts at you, so it doesn't make sense unless you follow people. You can follow Botany One @botanyone@botany.social, and we'll be boosting other accounts we see.
Signing up can also be confusing, as you choose a home server. Botany.Social isn't offering accounts at the moment, but if you're interested in Mastodon here are some science based servers: ecoevo.social, fediscience.org, genomic.social, mapstodon.space (GIS), mstdn.science, & scicomm.xyz.
You can also sign up at generic servers like mastodon.cloud, mastodon.social, & mstdn.social
News & Views
The scandal of researchers paid less than a living wage â www.nature.com The cost-of-living crisis is a fundamental threat for PhD scholars and early-career researchers. They need to be paid properly.
The Wood Wide Web: Scientists Debate Whether Trees Really Talk â www.nytimes.com From Ted Lasso to TED Talks, the theory of the âwood-wide webâ is everywhere, and some scientists argue that it is overblown and unproven.
Plant-soil interactions: the cycle of life â franciskadevries.wordpress.com
Last spring, I [Franciska de Vries] gave a TED talk about plant-soil interactions and their importance in the global carbon cycle at a TEDx event organised by Amsterdam University College. You can watch the video below, but for those of you who rather read (actually, I am one of those people, as I never have the patience to watch a video from beginning to end!) you can also read the full text below.
Transparent peer review for all Communications
Starting in 2016, we [Nature Communications] have offered authors the option to publish the comments received from the reviewers and their responses alongside the paper. As we believe that transparency strengthens the quality of peer review, we are now moving to publish the exchanges between authors and reviewers for all research articles submitted from November 2022 onward and accepted for publication. Referees will still have the option to remain completely anonymous, to sign their reports, and/or to choose to be acknowledged by name as part of our reviewer recognition scheme.
Hundred-year-old riddle in botany reveals key plant adaptation to dry land â phys.org The green world that we live in would not have been possible without hidden changes to the plant body over the last 400 million years. To grow beyond just centimeters tall outside of the wettest places on land, plants had to re-arrange their water-conducting tissues to keep them safe from drought.
Military veterans plant wildflowers for threatened butterfly at Eden Project â www.bbc.co.uk Military veterans have helped plant 400 wildflowers at the Eden Project to benefit a threatened butterfly.
Mood shifts on gene-edited crops as droughts and wars bite
A punishing drought meant Dutch farmer Hendrik Jan ten Cate was forced to spray water from a local canal on his potatoes to prevent them shrinking. âIrrigation is very expensive. About 10 per cent of my costs was water this summer,â he says. âFarmers who could not irrigate lost half their harvest.â He can see only one answer if Europeans still want to eat home-produced food: gene-edited crops, which are more resistant to drought and extreme heat
âItâs like winning the lotteryâ: Lincolnshire rewilding plan welcomed by some... others not so happy Project promises to create jobs and restore biodiversity, but locals say it is taking food-growing land out of production
Scientists genetically engineer plants to yield more vegetable oil â phys.org Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have successfully genetically modified a plant protein that is responsible for oil accumulation in plant seeds and edible nuts.
Point of View: The biospheric emergency calls for scientists to change tactics
Racimo et al., as members of the movement Scientist Rebellion, call on life scientists to re-embrace advocacy and activism â which were once hallmarks of academia â in order to highlight the urgency and necessity of systemic change across our societies.
The many meanings of moss Moss is ancient, and grows at a glacial pace, but it lives alongside us everywhere, country and city, a witness to the human world and its catastrophic speed. What can we learn by tuning in to âmoss timeâ?
Scientific Papers
The benefits of contributing to the citizen science platform iNaturalist as an identifier â journals.plos.org
As the number of observations submitted to the citizen science platform iNaturalist continues to grow, it is increasingly important that these observations can be identified to the finest taxonomic level, maximizing their value for biodiversity research. Callaghan et al. explore the benefits of acting as an identifier on iNaturalist.
Stull synthesizes previous systematic, paleobotanical, and phylogenetic and phylogeographic studies to establish what is known, and unknown, about this disjunction pattern to provide a roadmap for future research. He argues that this disjunction pattern, and the evolutionary history and fossil record of the Mexican flora more broadly, represents a key missing piece in the broader puzzle of Northern Hemisphere biogeography.
Systemic control of plant regeneration and wound repair
Omary et al. review the evidence for systemic signals that regulate regeneration on a plant-wide level. We focus on the role of auxin and sugars as shortâ and long-range signals in natural wounding contexts and discuss the varied origin of these signals in different regeneration scenarios.
Dryland productivity under a changing climate â www.nature.com
Wang et al. review recent advances in the study of dryland productivity and ecosystem function and examine major outstanding debates on dryland responses to environmental changes. They highlight often-neglected uncertainties in the observation and prediction of dryland productivity and elucidate the complexity of dryland dynamics.
Global pine tree invasions are linked to invasive root symbionts
Symbiotic soil microbes can facilitate plant invasions, yet it is unclear whether the invasive capacity of plants can be explained by the invasiveness of their microbial symbionts. After compiling a global dataset on associations between non-native invasive pine trees and ectomycorrhizal fungi (EMF), Policelli et al. found that the interaction with invasive EMF is an important predictor of pine invasion success that acts in concert with aboveground plant traits, questioning the way we currently predict plant invasions.
âWiring Diagramâ for source-strength traits impacting wheat yield potential Source traits are currently of great interest for the enhancement of yield potential, for example much effort is being expended to find ways of modifying photosynthesis. However, photosynthesis is but one component of crop regulation so sink activities and the coordination of diverse processes throughout the crop must be considered in an integrated, systems approach. A set of âWiring Diagramsâ has been devised as a visual tool to integrate the interactions of component processes at different stages of wheat development.
Sustained productivity and agronomic potential of perennial rice â www.nature.com
Zhang et al. report the successful breeding of perennial rice and assess its performance and potential. Domesticated, annual Asian rice (Oryza sativa) was hybridized with its perennial African relative Oryza longistaminata. From a single planting, irrigated perennial rice produced grain for eight consecutive harvests over four years, averaging 6.8âMgâhaâ1âharvestâ1 versus the 6.7âMg of replanted annual rice, which required additional labour and seed.
Rising temperatures are influencing forests on many scales, with potentially strong variation vertically across forest strata. Using published research and new analyses, Vinod et al. evaluate how microclimate and leaf temperatures, traits, and gas exchange vary vertically in forests, shaping tree and ecosystem ecology.
Time for a drought experiment: Do you know your plantsâ water status?
Water potential and related physiological parameters can be measured with relatively modest investment in equipment and effort. Juenger and Verslues propose that increased use of water potential as a fundamental descriptor of plant water status can enhance the insight gained from many drought-related experiments and facilitate data integration and sharing across laboratories and research disciplines.
Two nitrate sensors, how many more? â www.nature.com
Nitrate is a nutrient and a signal. Membrane protein NRT1.1 reflects this duality as both a nitrate transporter and sensor. A new perception mechanism has just been discovered: transcription factor NLP7 is also a nitrate sensor. Thus, two distinct but interacting systems perceive nitrate. Are there others?
ReadCube: rdcu.be/cY8DR
Prosopanche: A remarkable genus of parasitic plants
Prosopanche is a poorly known genus of parasitic plants from South and Central America. Growing almost entirely underground with a complete lack of leaves, plants of Prosopanche bear more resemblance to fungi than plants and have many remarkable aspects to their life history and ecology that require further investigation. Hatt et al. provide an up-to-date revision of the current state of understanding of Prosopanche, including taxonomy, biogeography, plant-pollinator ecology and host-parasite interactions.
Recoloring tomato fruit by CRISPR/Cas9-mediated multiplex gene editing
Yang et al. proposed a rapid breeding strategy to generate tomato lines with different colored fruits from red-fruited materials by CRISPR/Cas9-mediated multiplex gene editing of three fruit color-related genes (PSY1, MYB12, and SGR1). Using this strategy, the red-fruited cultivar Alisa Craig has been engineered to a series of tomato genotypes with different fruit colors, including yellow, brown, pink, light-yellow, pink-brown, yellow-green, and light green.
Careers
Undergraduate Research Internships - Boyce Thompson Institute While BTI & Cornell offer various projects and opportunities for undergraduates, all selected students will be considered apart of one cohort and participate in joint activities during the 10-week program.
7 PhD Fully Funded Positions in Plant Sciences at Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research and University of Cologne in Germany As a highly international program, we encourage students from all countries to apply. Successful applicants will be enrolled at a German University, which is typically the University of Cologne (UoC).
Reporter or Senior Reporter, Nature The international science journal Nature is looking for two journalists to contribute to our award-winning coverage of scientific research and policy.
Head of Metabolomics Facility (f/m/d) - Leibniz-Institut fĂŒr Pflanzenbiochemie The successful candidate will lead the metabolomics laboratory and act as a co-speaker of the MetaCom Center jointly with the head of the Plant Computational Biochemistry Group (Dr. S. Neumann). The personnel of the metabolomics facility will consist of three senior scientists and five technical assistants. A central task is active involvement in collaborations with all IPB departments.
Spatial Scientist / Ecologist Three, two-year spatial scientist posts are available within the Land Use and Ecosystem Services (LUES) Science Group with Forest Research. Forest Research (FR) is the research agency of the Forestry Commission, and a world leader in applied forest science and a trusted and recognised provider of expertise, data, products and services for governments and the tree, wood, forest and natural resource sectors
Senior Editor - Journal of Applied Ecology We are seeking an ecologist who is highly-motivated in advancing the publication of applied ecological research to join the team of Editors on Journal of Applied Ecology
Senior Editorial Assistant - New Phytologist We are seeking to appoint an enthusiastic and proactive individual to the role of Senior Editorial Assistant. The role holder will join the New Phytologist Central Office team, based at Lancaster University, working remotely in the first instance. The role holder will primarily support production processes for New Phytologist, with opportunities to contribute to the peer-review, promotion and development of the journals published by the New Phytologist Foundation.Â
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The email is funded by the Annals of Botany Company.