Plant Science news from www.synbio.org.uk

Regulation of nitrogen fixation

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 00:03:20 +0100

Regulation of nitrogen fixation in legumes

ScienceDaily (Mar. 10, 2010) — Nitrogen is vital for all plant life, but increasingly the planet is paying a heavy price for the escalating use of nitrogen fertilizer.

Scientists Develop Gene Switch for Chloroplasts in Plant Cells

ScienceDaily (Apr. 13, 2010) — In plant cells, the cell nucleus and the mitochondria are not the only places where genes are read and translated into proteins. The organelles of photosynthesis -- the chloroplasts -- also have...

Synthetic Biology and the rhizosphere

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 18:45:01 +0100

Can Corn Fix its Own Nitrogen?
4/1/2010

Pam Smith, Farm Journal Seeds & Production Editor (from http://www.agweb.com/get_article.aspx?src=gennews&pageid=156722)

Growth Assembly

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 11:37:47 +0100

From Hardware To Wetware: A Potential Manufacturing Paradigm Shift

From : http://www.psfk.com/2010/03/from-hardware-to-wetware-a-potential-manufacturing-paradigm-shift.html

3/30/2010 4:52:31 PM
Can Corn Fix its Own Nitrogen?

Pam Smith, Farm Journal Seeds & Production Editor

The Holy Grail for the corn industry is a hybrid that would fix its own nitrogen. University of Illinois agricultural engineer Kaustubh Bhalerao believes research in synthetic biology may be the key to “teaching” corn to do just that.

“We now understand enough about how genes work and how proteins are produced that we can actually...

Liverwort genome sequence

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:08:32 +0100

Marchantia: Liverwort genome sequence

The origin of land plants (embryophytes) was one of the major evolutionary events in the history of planet earth. Experimental, paleontological, morphological, and molecular systematic data all point to the liverworts as being some of the first plants to evolve and colonize the Ordovician landscape. Thus liverworts are a key group to include in any comparative study aimed at understanding the origin and evolution of organisms...

Digital Flowers

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:17:08 +0100

Arts: Botanical Drawings for the Digital Age

Red Menace: Stop the Ug99 Fungus Before Its Spores Bring Starvation

Giants and midgets of the plant kingdom

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:24:16 +0100

The quest to catalogue Earth's rich flora has taken botanists to the farthest flung and most treacherous corners of the world, from the humid rainforests of the Amazon to the highest peaks of Borneo.

Two breakthroughs in rice science: flood-tolerance and drought-tolerance boost yields

Rice, the world's most important staple crop, recently was the subject of a tremendous...

Irrigation system can grow crops with salt water

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:00:58 +0100

Irrigation system can grow crops with salt water

By Katie Scott from Wired UK

A British...

Tree ecology

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:22:33 +0100

Seeing the Tree from the Forest

From: http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news-DA-Seeing-the-Tree-from-the-Forest-082709.aspx

Algorithm explores future changes in plant populations

RNA-mediated chromatin-based silencing in plants.

Matzke M, Kanno T, Daxinger L, Huettel B, Matzke AJ.

Curr Opin Cell Biol. 2009 Jun;21(3):367-376. Epub 2009 Feb 23.

Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Dr. Bohr-Gasse 3, A-1030 Vienna, Austria.

The plant that can water itself

Sat, 23 May 2009 00:33:25 +0100

Flowering Plants Evolved Very Quickly Into Five Groups

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071126170900.htm

Insight Into Evolution Of First Flowers

ScienceDaily (May 19, 2009) — Charles Darwin described the sudden origin of flowering plants about 130 million years ago as an abominable mystery, one that scientists have yet...

Solar Powered Vertical Drip Hydroponics

Sat, 16 May 2009 20:23:01 +0100

Solar Powered Vertical Drip Hydroponics with French Ironwork Details

I really wanted a way to grow a substantial amount of produce without using any power that required a plug to do it, and to make it look good - more like furniture that you would want inside the house. So I built this.

There are a million ways to set up some recyclables and an aquarium pump to grow a few plants. I've done this plenty of times. It wasn't good enough for the power it was using, and the materials never lasted that long. Plastic...

Plant peptides in signalling

Sat, 16 May 2009 20:22:00 +0100

Trends Plant Sci. 2009 May;14(5):255-63. Epub 2009 Apr 9.

Plant peptides in signalling: looking for new partners.

Butenko MA, Vie AK, Brembu T, Aalen RB, Bones AM.

Department of Molecular Biosciences, University of Oslo, N-0316 Oslo, Norway.

A novel candidate ligand-receptor system, INFLORESCENCE DEFICIENT IN ABSCISSION (IDA) and the related receptor-like kinases (RLKs) HAESA (HAE) and HAESA-LIKE (HSL)2, has been shown to control floral abscission in Arabidopsis thaliana. Furthermore, several IDA-LIKE (IDL) proteins, which contain a conserved C-terminal domain resembling that of the CLAVATA (CLV)3-ENDOSPERM SURROUNDING REGION...