🌻 TWiB September 12, 2022
It's one of those weeks where a non-Botany story has dominated most of the shares on Twitter, but if you want a break from that story there's still plenty below.
If you're looking for something interesting to do next week, there's Zoom webinar coming up in the Royal Society of Biology plant health series that will look at the plant health sector from an international perspective. Keynote speaker Dr MaryLucy Oronje, sanitary and phytosanitary scientist at CABI, will be discussing the use of multi-country coordination to limit the spread of transboundary pests in Africa and will touch upon some of CABI's projects towards limiting the spread of these pests. This will be followed by an audience Q&A and discussion. Registration is free via http://www.rsb.org.uk/planthealth.
There could be a delay in sending out the newsletter next week. My sister's family are over from Australia for the first time in a few years, and I'll be meeting them over the weekend in Aberystwyth. It means I'll be away from my usual set up. A laptop tends to feel cramped with my large hands, so it might have to wait till I get home. Until next week, take care.
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
In Botany One
Machine learning used to identify transcription factor-DNA interactions — botany.one Surveying machine learning methods to improve detection of binding sites.
Less Is More When Plants Call for Aid — botany.one Scientists find that reducing fertilizer input to a field can help plants call for assistance when fighting off herbivores.
A rare shrub needs to burn to avoid extinction — botany.one Camera traps show that it's not missing pollinators that leave an Australian shrub critically endangered.
Autonomous construction of 3D leaves — botany.one An assessment of deep generative networks in creating realistic 3D data
New Modelling Reveals Opportunities to Blunt Plant Invasions Before They Reach a Tipping Point — botany.one An examination of herbarium records has helped track the dynamics of plant invasions.
News & Views
48% of people talk to their plants and it might be making them happier, according to a new survey — www.cnbc.com Do you talk to your plants? If not, maybe you should – nearly half, 48%, of people surveyed by Trees.com admitted that they talk to the leafy creatures.
Career: Why I shrank my lab by half A medical diagnosis sets a principal investigator on a new path.
Burning forests for energy isn’t ‘renewable’ – now the EU must admit it The EU’s classification of wood fuels is accelerating the climate crisis. Next week, a key vote can change that
Lightning strikes shape tropical forests — phys.org It's easy to see how droughts, fires and other features of the environment alter and determine the shape of a forest, from the trees that compose it, to where and which trees grow and live together. But another happenstance of nature plays an under-appreciated role in the overall make-up and health of forests: Lightning.
Plant thieves are the root of all evil Plant theft has been going on for years but I didn’t realise that cacti and succulents were a special target. Director and chief executive of the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne Tim Entwisle says thieves target his cacti and succulents too.
Europe Is Sacrificing Its Ancient Forests for Energy - The New York Times — www.nytimes.com Governments bet billions on burning timber for green power. The Times went deep into one of the continent’s oldest woodlands to track the hidden cost.
They transformed an abandoned auto shop into a plant haven — and neighborhood hub — www.latimes.com It’s a quiet Sunday night along Jefferson Boulevard in West Adams, but the Plant Chica is buzzing with activity. Inside the neighborhood plant shop, it’s standing room only as a group of LBGTQ writers listens to poetry and dines on vegan tacos. This is exactly what co-owner Sandra Mejia had envisioned when she and husband, Bantalem Adis, set out to open a plant shop in their neighborhood: a community space where everyone is welcome regardless of who they are or what they look like.
Why Did Ferns Persist When All Other Plants Perished? — www.the-scientist.com A strange layer in the fossil record contains evidence that fern populations exploded following the mass extinction that ended the Cretaceous period. Scientists want to know why.
A history of botany and colonialism touched off by a moss bed — aeon.co Inside a rainforest or on the city pavement, moss asks so little yet offers so much: a tactile encounter with time itself
Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide Tree-planting has been widely seen as an effective way of binding carbon as carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere. But now researchers from the University of Gothenburg and elsewhere are warning that forests on nutrient-poor land won't be an additional carbon sink in the long term. As forests age, their uptake of CO2 declines and, each time forests are planted, there is a risk of additional carbon being released from the soil.
First discovery of microplastics from water trapped on plant leaves — phys.org Although they have not been around for long, microplastics have found their way to almost every ecosystem on the planet. They have been discovered in the soil, in rivers, in our food and bottled water, and even in the human body. Recently, a team of researchers found, for the first time, microplastics in water trapped in plant leaf axils.
World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds Giant ice sheets, ocean currents and permafrost regions may already have passed point of irreversible change
Scientific Papers
The topological shape of gene expression across the evolution of flowering plants
Since they emerged ~125 million years ago, flowering plants have evolved to dominate the terrestrial landscape and survive in the most inhospitable environments on earth. At their core, these adaptations have been shaped by changes in numerous, interconnected pathways and genes that collectively give rise to emergent biological phenomena. Linking gene expression to morphological outcomes remains a grand challenge in biology, and new approaches are needed to begin to address this gap. Palande et al. implemented topological data analysis (TDA) to summarize the high dimensionality and noisiness of gene expression data using lens functions that delineate plant tissue and stress responses.
BREEDIT: a multiplex genome editing strategy to improve complex quantitative traits in maize — academic.oup.com
Lorenzo et al. present the gene discovery pipeline BREEDIT, which combines multiplex genome editing of whole gene families with crossing schemes to improve complex traits such as yield and drought tolerance. They induced gene knockouts in 48 growth-related genes into maize (Zea mays) using CRISPR/Cas9 and generated a collection of over 1,000 gene-edited plants.
A thousand-genome panel retraces the global spread and climatic adaptation of a major crop pathogen
Human activity impacts the evolutionary trajectories of many species worldwide. Global trade of agricultural goods contributes to the dispersal of pathogens reshaping their genetic makeup and providing opportunities for virulence gains. Understanding how pathogens surmount control strategies and cope with new climates is crucial to predicting the future impact of crop pathogens. Fuertey et al. address this by assembling a global thousand-genome panel of Zymoseptoria tritici, a major fungal pathogen of wheat reported in all production areas worldwide.
The sugar transporter ZmSUGCAR1 of the nitrate transporter 1/peptide transporter family is critical for maize grain filling — academic.oup.com
Maternal-to-filial nutrition transfer is central to grain development and yield. nitrate transporter 1/peptide transporter (NRT1-PTR)-type transporters typically transport nitrate, peptides, and ions. Yang et al. report the identification of a maize (Zea mays) NRT1-PTR-type transporter that transports sucrose and glucose. The activity of this sugar transporter, named Sucrose and Glucose Carrier 1 (SUGCAR1), was systematically verified by tracer-labeled sugar uptake and serial electrophysiological studies including two-electrode voltage-clamp, non-invasive microelectrode ion flux estimation assays in Xenopus laevis oocytes and patch clamping in HEK293T cells.
Morphological disparity of extant and extinct pinaceous ovulate cones: How many cones are enough?
De Brito et al. used linear and geometric morphometry to quantify the shape of the extensive sample of Cretaceous cones of Belgium. These methods were also applied to extant pinaceous species to compare the morphological disparity of Cretaceous assemblages against those of today in selected ecosystems.
Neglected plant parasites: Mitrastemonaceae
Teixeira-Costa and Suetsugu review key aspects of the life cycle, reproductive ecology, and host relationships in the family Mitrastemonaceae to identify gaps in our current knowledge and instigate future research.
Uncoupling differential water usage from drought resistance in a dwarf Arabidopsis mutant
Ginzburg et al. reassessed the drought phenotype of the Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) dwarf mutant, chiquita1-1 (chiq1-1, also called constitutively stressed 1 (cost1)), by growing mutant seedlings together with the wild type to ensure uniform soil water availability across genotypes. Their results demonstrate that the dwarf phenotype conferred by loss of CHIQ1 function results in constitutively lower water usage per plant, but not increased drought resistance.
The hierarchy of factors predicting the latitudinal diversity gradient
Brodie and Mannion propose a hierarchy of factors driving the latitudinal distribution of diversity: (i) over geologically long time spans, diversity is largely predicted by climate; (ii) when climatic gradients are shallow, diversity tracks habitat area; and (iii) historical contingencies linked to niche conservatism have geologically short-term, transient influence at most. Thus, latitudinal diversity gradients, although variable in strength and direction, are largely predictable on our planet and possibly others.
Forest structure and composition alleviate human thermal stress
Gillerot et al. report over 14 months of hourly microclimate data from 131 forest plots across four European countries and compare these to open-field controls using physiologically equivalent temperature (PET) to reflect human thermal perception. Forests slightly tempered cold extremes, but the strongest buffering occurred under very hot conditions (PET > 35°C), where forests reduced strong to extreme heat stress day occurrence by 84.1%.
Comparative analyses of growth-regulatory mechanisms between Arabidopsis and maize revealed that even when the gene space is conserved, the translation of knowledge from model species to crops is not trivial. Based on these insights, Inzé and Nelissen formulate future opportunities to improve the interpretation of curiosity-driven research towards crop improvement.
Careers
Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Plant Science (0.8fte) 30 months fixed term The School of Biological and Environmental Sciences seeks to appoint a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Plant Science. This is an exciting opportunity to join a collaborative project funded by the UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS). The project is Optimising Miscanthus Establishment through improved mechanisation and data capture to meet Net Zero targets (OMENZ). You will work on the Biofuel Crop Miscanthus, applying novel techniques to break dormancy and improve the establishment and growth of Miscanthus rhizomes and seeds. Our previous research has shown that priming treatments utilising plant growth regulators and environmental stimuli, can improve Miscanthus rhizome establishment and growth rates. The research will be undertaken primarily at our on-campus glasshouse and controlled environment facilities, our well-equipped laboratory facilities and at UK based field locations.
Post-doc Modelling tomato plant responses to short and long term environmental fluctuations Would you like to develop numerical models that contribute to improving the yield and sustainability of crop production in greenhouses and vertical farms? Are you interested in understanding how plants behave in a controlled environment? Then this could be the ideal research position for you!
Assistant Professor (9 month, tenure-track), Plant Pathologist The successful candidate is expected to develop an innovative, nationally and internationally recognized, extramurally funded research program that will advance the mission of research and education in plant pathology at the University of Tennessee. Specific research foci (and the approaches employed) are open. Areas of plant pathology research may include (but are not limited to) resilient food production systems, climate change biology, computational biology, controlled environmental agriculture, host-pathogen interactions, pathogen epigenetics, pathogen genomics, pathogen molecular biology and all aspects of pathogen biology, ecology, and epidemiology.
POSTDOC-1 Our group at the Plant Health Institute of Montpellier (PHIM, France) and Center for Structural Biology (CBS, France) Â is searching for a postdoc with experience in STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY to join us on a project funded by an ERC starting grant on the role of fungal effectors during plant infection.
POSTDOC-2 Our group at the Plant Health Institute of Montpellier (PHIM, France) is searching for a postdoc with experience in MOLECULAR GENETICS OF PLANT-MICROBE INTERACTIONS to join us on a project funded by an ERC starting grant on the role of fungal effectors during plant infection.
General Manager Due to a combination of structural changes and extensive growth over the last five years, we are seeking a General Manager who will further drive and enhance the business operations, provide innovative and forward-thinking guidance to our leadership team, and work collaboratively with our ecologists, GIS analysts and support staff to ensure delivery of the highest quality services.
Postdoctoral Position in High Throughput Phenotyping to Improve Crop Production A postdoctoral research associate position is available within the Realizing Improved Photosynthetic Efficiency (https://ripe.illinois.edu/) project at the University of Illinois. We are seeking a candidate to conduct research on advancing development and application of high throughput phenotyping techniques to improve understanding of crop physiology-environmental interactions with the goal of breeding more productive and resilient crops. The successful candidate will conduct research primarily at the RIPE Aerial Phenotyping Platform (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U89zXRslzI4), a 4-Ha cable-based outdoor phenotyping facility, but will also have opportunity to contribute to other ongoing research as part of the RIPE Project. The candidate will work as a member of a productive and multidisciplinary team of scientists working to improve global food security.
Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty - Molecular Genetics The Ohio State University invites applicants to apply for two tenure-track faculty positions at the Assistant Professor level in the Department of Molecular Genetics. Investigators using any experimental system to address fundamentally important biological questions in any area of Developmental Biology, Cell Biology, and/or Molecular Epigenetics are encouraged to apply. Applicants with interest and expertise in imaging, quantitative biology, computational biology, systems biology, and/or integrated approaches will be especially competitive.
Postdoctoral Research Associate A position is open for a Postdoc Research Associate in Control of meiotic recombination in Arabidopsis, in the Henderson Group in the Department of Plant Sciences. Meiotic recombination is a major mechanism that creates genetic diversity in plants and animals and remains a vital tool during crop breeding. This project will explore molecular mechanisms that control the number and distribution of recombination events (crossovers) genome-wide in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. We have identified recombination factors (e.g. HEI10) and epigenetic marks (e.g. DNA methylation) that regulate crossover formation in plants (Ziolkowski et al; Yelina et al). In this project, the successful candidate will use molecular genetics and genomics approaches to further understand the control of recombination patterns in the Arabidopsis genome. We have recently used long-read DNA sequencing to complete assembly of the Arabidopsis centromeres (Naish et al). The candidate will explore new ways of using long-read sequencing to study recombination.
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