🥬 TWiB October 24, 2022
I've leaned heavily on Eurekalert this week, and I might have to do that next week too. I'll be looking at a redesign of the site. The current design came about because we needed to lose page weight. While I like it, there are things we'd like to do that we can't, so I'm looking at a refresh. For various reasons, this will have to be on a tight deadline if it's to happen. The upside for you is that, if it works as I want, we can increase what we cover and how we cover it.
I also expect to lean heavily on the automatic systems for tracking what's happening on Twitter next week. As always, I trim the purely political news out of the popular links shared below, but the links I've seen this week have made me seriously consider that someone has spiked the local water supply with hallucinogens. So I'll be avoiding quite a bit of social media myself, in the hope that I can avoid some of the madder claims. There'll be another politics-free round-up of botanical twitter at the same time next week.
Until then, take care.
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
In Botany One
House plants – the exotic within the home — botany.one
Nigel Chaffey reviews House Plants by Mike Maunder.
Archaeologists race against the climate to preserve aboriginal art — botany.one Trees that have stood for thousands of years may soon collapse due to climate change. If they do, they'll take irreplaceable aboriginal art with them.
Botanists investigate fairy circles in the desert — botany.one When plants in the Namib desert suffer from water stress, strange things happen.
News & Views
"Writing paper introductions are hard. I often referred to 'Writing a good introduction' by Prof. Jim Kurose during my PhD. Now looking at it for my first draft as a Postdoc." @TanyaShreedhar
This Nearly Lost Ancient Grain Tradition Could Be the Future of Farming — www.atlasobscura.com A past global staple you’ve never heard of, maslins are poised for a comeback.
Londiwe Mokoena: A grass tussock in a savanna: My journey in occupying space in the world of ecology — jecologyblog.com
For Black History Month, the British Ecological Society (BES) journals are celebrating the work of Black ecologists from around the world and sharing their stories. The theme for UK Black History Month this year is Time for Change: Action Not Words. Londiwe Mokoena—a postgraduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa—shares her story.
European colonial legacy is still visible in today’s alien floras — www.eurekalert.org Alien floras in regions that were once occupied by the same European power are, on average, more similar to each other compared to outside regions and this similarity increases with the length of time a region was occupied.
The essential functions of R cheatsheet — www.rforecology.com Something that I quickly came to learn as an ecologist using R is that out of the hundreds (possibly thousands?) of functions available in R, only a handful were those that I used frequently throughout my code.
The power of your garden's hidden half — www.bbc.com The evolution of roots transformed life on Earth – and understanding them could help us to grow more resilient plants.
How to make cover letters instructive — www.nature.com Succinctly convey the study’s context, emphases, implications and limitations.
Talking Points: Angeline Dukes on racism in science "Sooooo," tweeted PhD student Angeline Dukes back in July 2020, "when are we doing a #BlackInNeuro week?". The tweet went viral and today Black In Neuro is a registered non-profit organization with a mission to "diversify the neurosciences by building a community that celebrates and empowers Black scholars and professionals". Here, Angeline (@TheRealDrDukes) – who is now an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota – discusses how attitudes towards diversity in science are changing and what she hopes the academic workforce will look like in 10 years.
James Lovelock: the death of scientific independence? — aeon.co As the planet lurches towards a climate emergency and its life support systems falter, the need for visionary thinkers with fresh insights and big ideas has never been more pressing. No wonder, then, that the world mourned the death earlier this year of James (‘Jim’) Lovelock, whose Gaia theory provided a new framework to think about nature, one that changed the way we regard our relationship with Earth.
Photographer And His Wife Plant 2 Million Trees In 20 Years To Restore A Destroyed Forest And Even The Animals Have Returned — www.boredpanda.com “The land was as sick as I was – everything was destroyed,” Salgado said in The Guardian back in 2015. “Only about 0.5% of the land was covered in trees. Then my wife had a fabulous idea to replant this forest. And when we began to do that, then all the insects and birds and fish returned and, thanks to this increase of the trees I, too, was reborn – this was the most important moment.”
Scientific Papers
Naturalized alien floras still carry the legacy of European colonialism — www.nature.com
The redistribution of alien species across the globe accelerated with the start of European colonialism. European powers were responsible for the deliberate and accidental transportation, introduction and establishment of alien species throughout their occupied territories and the metropolitan state. Lenzer et al. show that these activities left a lasting imprint on the global distribution of alien plants.
Root-knot nematodes produce functional mimics of tyrosine-sulfated plant peptides
Yimer et al. report the identification of genes from root-knot nematodes predicted to encode PSY-like peptides (MigPSYs) with high sequence similarity to both bacterial RaxX and plant PSYs. Sulfated synthetic peptides corresponding to predicted MigPSYs stimulate root growth in Arabidopsis. MigPSY transcript levels are highest early in the infection cycle. Down-regulation of MigPSY gene expression reduces root galling and egg production, suggesting that the MigPSYs serve as nematode virulence factors.
Carrying the Moral Burden of Safe Fieldwork
Fieldwork in ecology and the environmental sciences often leads to negative physical and emotional outcomes for workers. Blonder argues that this is largely due to an abdication of responsibility on the part of their supervisors, and that supervisors are charged with carrying three interlinked moral burdens: first, the duty of promoting safety; second, the duty of ensuring safe experiences are accessible to all; and third, the duty of continuing to learn and improve. To help, he offers a set of safety actions that supervisors can easily implement. He then offers a set of personal reflections on how we should think about failure, accountability, learning, repair, and forgiveness in the scientific workplace.
Spatially structured eco-evolutionary dynamics in a host-pathogen interaction render isolated populations vulnerable to disease — www.nature.com
While the negative effects that pathogens have on their hosts are well-documented in humans and agricultural systems, direct evidence of pathogen-driven impacts in wild host populations is scarce and mixed. Here, to determine how the strength of pathogen-imposed selection depends on spatial structure, Höckerstedt et al. analyze growth rates across approximately 4000 host populations of a perennial plant through time coupled with data on pathogen presence-absence. They find that infection decreases growth more in the isolated than well-connected host populations.
Science is a rollercoaster The re-emergence of ABP1 as an exciting auxin receptor, after a rather bumpy history, shows once again how scientific ideas can survive sudden losses in popularity.
No cell is an island: characterising the leaf epidermis using epidermalmorph, a new R package
Brown and Jordan present a method to characterise individual cell size, shape (including the effect of neighbouring cells), and arrangement from light microscope images. They provide the first automated characterisation of cell arrangement (from traced images) as well as multiple new shape characteristics. They have implemented this method in an R package, epidermalmorph, and provide an example workflow using this package, which includes functions to evaluate trait reliability and optimal sampling effort for any given group of plants.
Single Seed Microbiota: Assembly and Transmission from Parent Plant to Seedling The seed acts as the primary inoculum source for the plant microbiota. Understanding the processes involved in its assembly and dynamics during germination and seedling emergence has the potential to allow for the improvement of crop establishment. Changes in the bacterial community structure were tracked in 1,000 individual seeds that were collected throughout seed developments of beans and radishes. Seeds were associated with a dominant bacterial taxon that represented more than 75% of all reads.
High-frequency synthetic apomixis in hybrid rice
Introducing asexual reproduction through seeds – apomixis – into crop species could revolutionize agriculture by allowing F1 hybrids with enhanced yield and stability to be clonally propagated. Engineering synthetic apomixis has proven feasible in inbred rice through the inactivation of three genes (MiMe), which results in the conversion of meiosis into mitosis in a line ectopically expressing the BABYBOOM1 (BBM1) parthenogenetic trigger in egg cells. However, only 10–30% of the seeds were clonal. Vernet et al. show here that synthetic apomixis can be induced in a F1 hybrid of rice by inducing MiMe mutations and egg cell expression of BBM1 in a single step.
Harris et al. identify values and combinations of traits that can be indicative of biogeographic regions. This functional bioregionalisation shows greater spatial congruence with that derived from species composition than from remote sensing. However, spatial congruence is low at the continent scale (19%–37%), and varies greatly among regions and in pairwise comparisons between bioregionalisations.
The proportion of large gaps in the forest canopy varied substantially over the Brazilian Amazon. Reis et al. show that the trends can be explained by geographical variation in disturbance and growth. The frequency of extreme weather events is predicted to increase under climate change, and changes could lead to greater forest disturbance, which should be detectable as an increased proportion of large gaps in intact forests.
Careers
GRANTS - Field Inclusive, Inc.
Field Inclusive amplifies and supports Black-identifying and historically excluded individuals who professionally work outdoors in any natural resources field. This research grant is meant to support natural science field work including equipment purchases, field housing, transportation, or technician salary. (February 1, 2023 deadline)
Tenure track Assistant Professor position in Population Biology - UCLA The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) at UCLA is searching for a tenure track Assistant Professor in population biology. We seek candidates who apply quantitative approaches to test theory-driven questions on the ecology or evolution of populations.
Assistant or Associate Professor of Biological Science - University of Tulsa The Department of Biological Science at The University of Tulsa invites applications for a tenure-track Professor position at the Assistant or Associate level with demonstrated expertise in genetics/genomics. We seek a creative and interactive individual working on fundamental problems that include a laboratory and/or field component. We anticipate a Fall 2023 start date for this position.
Analytical Instrumentation Officer - La Trobe University This position is for an analytical (bio)chemist and primarily involves the assisting in the development of new techniques and approaches to the structural characterisation and quantitative and qualitative analysis, primarily by mass spectrometry and NMR, of cannabinoids, terpenes and other components of plant extracts such as, but not limited to, cannabis, with the aim of comparing profiles for a range of germplasm varieties and growing conditions.
Urban Agriculture Technology Area Advisor in Irvine, CA for UC Agriculture & Natural Resources The Urban Agriculture Technology Area Advisor will implement an innovative extension education and applied research program integrating several disciplines to focus on expanding agriculture technologies in urban and peri-urban communities, focusing on controlled environment agriculture (CEA) production.
Research Associate / Senior Research Associate in Evolutionary Morphology - University of Bristol We are recruiting three full-time Research Associate / Senior Research Associate positions, based in the Rayfield and Donoghue Labs of the Palaeobiology Research Group in the School of Earth Sciences, located in the Life Sciences Building. The role is funded through a project grant from the Templeton Foundation on ‘An Integrated Quantitative Approach To Characterising Organismal Design-space And Tests Of Evolutionary Causality’. The aim of the project is to elucidate the causal bases of the diversity of organismal design. This will be achieved by employing a novel theoretical morphology approach to characterise the possible diversity of forms in three organ systems, jaws, wings and leaves, and subject these shapes to functional and optimality analyses. We are seeking to recruit three postdoctoral researchers who will act as the principal researcher responsible one of the three organ systems.
Junior Specialist - Bogar lab - UC Davis The Bogar Lab in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of California, Davis is seeking a Junior Specialist to contribute to ecological, physiological, and genomic investigations of symbiosis between plant roots and soil fungi. The Junior Specialist will work closely with the PI and other lab members to design and implement a variety of projects focused on ectomycorrhizal symbiosis.
Postdoctoral Scholar - Climate Change and Biodiversity Conservation - UC Berkeley The Ackerly Lab in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley seeks applications for a Postdoctoral Scholar to develop innovative analyses of the potential impacts of climate change on plant biodiversity, with a focus on the flora of California or the western US, and the implications for conservation and protected area management.
Research Fellow - University of Adelaide The successful candidate will be undertaking innovative research into next generation biotechnology pipelines for the agricultural industry. They will be responsible for the training of staff, students and the ITTC’s industry partners in plant transformation technologies, such as the generation of genetically modified and genome edited plants. The successful candidate will contribute to supervision of PhD students on projects involving biotechnology and trait analysis.
Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Ecology - The University of Melbourne The School of BioSciences is seeking an enthusiastic, collaborative, population, community or ecosystem ecologist to join the School of BioSciences at the University of Melbourne.
Ph.D. Position In Plant Evolutionary Ecology The Sheth plant evolutionary ecology lab in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC) invites applications for 1-2 Ph.D. students beginning in Fall 2023. We combine field, greenhouse, and growth chamber experiments, demographic modeling, and quantitative genetics to examine constraints to adaptation to climate across species geographic ranges.
Assistant Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology - University of Arizona The Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona is accepting applications for an Assistant Professor position (tenure track) to begin in August 2023. We are broadly interested in applicants working in any area of ecology (e.g. physiological, behavioral, population, community, global, theoretical, computational, experimental, field, and climate change ecology, as well as biodiversity science and eco-informatics). We welcome those with expertise in individual systems and those who integrate across approaches, systems, or scales. We encourage programs that involve local or regional systems and leverage the university’s experimental and computational resources.
Postdoctoral Research Associate in Plant Immunity (Fixed Term) - University of Cambridge
Applications are invited for a post-doctoral research associate in Plant immunity to work with Dr Lida Derevnina at the Crop Science Centre, starting between 1 January and 1 April 2023. Applicants must have a strong background in bioinformatics, genomics and be a proficient in at least one programming languages, eg python and R. A sound knowledge of plant-pathogen interactions, molecular biology techniques and experience working with nematodes are hugely advantageous.
Research Associate Photosynthesis (Fixed Term) - University of Cambridge We are seeking a highly motivated Post-doctoral Research Assistant / Associate specialised in photosynthetic gas exchange to join the Environmental Plant Physiology Group led by Dr Johannes Kromdijk. The position will form part of the 'DIRECTION' consortium funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and will work closely with collaborators at Københavns Universitet and the University of Potsdam. Funding will be for two years starting from January 2023 or as soon as practically possible.
Postdoctoral Research Assistant - University of Oxford The Department of Biology is seeking to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Associate (PDRA) for 36 months, financially supported by the BBSRC grant held by Dr Francesco Licausi. The work is to be conducted in his lab in the Department of Biology, University of Oxford. The research topic is ‘The evolution of oxygen sensing mechanisms in the green lineage’.
Arbuscular Mycorrhiza signalling in Wheat - Doctoral Training Partnership Norwich Next to nitrogen, phosphorus (P) is the most important nutrient needed by a wheat crop. P is essential for the plant development, the quality and formation of the seeds, to assist photosynthesis and, energy storage and cell division. Phosphate-delivering arbuscular mycorriza has enormous potential for sustainable agriculture and enhancement of wheat yield. However, AM association with crops including wheat is suboptimal due to genetic and environmental conditions. By combining the state-of-the-art technics in genetics, molecular biology and metabolomics this project aims at characterizing a novel signalling pathway modulating arbuscular mycorrhiza symbiosis.
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