Plant Biology Seminar Series
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Seminars from the RSB Division of Plant Sciences.
Upcoming events
Photosynthesis and leaf respiration are key metabolic processes for plant growth and their carbon exchange with the atmosphere are the largest within the global carbon cycle.
Will ecosystems maintain their biodiversity and function under global environmental change, and continue to sequester carbon and slow climate change?
Past events
Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is a spatial metabolomics technology used to map the distribution of metabolites in tissue cross sections or on surfaces of whole tissues.
A fundamental challenge in biology is dealing with high levels of heterogeneity, from genes in genomes, to developing tissues in an organism, to grass and trees in woodland biomes.
Over the last 10 years a number of studies have provided evidence demonstrating that improving photosynthesis can result in improved yield.
The fungal pathogen, Magnaporthe oryzae, causes disease on many economically important cereal crops such as rice, wheat and barley.
Rust diseases significantly threaten cereals and other crops, causing substantial losses in crop production worldwide and endangering global food security.
Mass Spectrometry Imaging (MSI) is an ex vivo approach used to map the distribution of biomolecules within thin sections of tissue.
Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), also known as retrotransposons, essentially carry two open reading frames that code for GAG and POL. Some ERVs additionally carry a third gene called envelope (env), becoming infectious.
Phylogenetic distance is a key measure used to develop host test lists that will delimit the fundamental and realised host range of candidate biocontrol agents.
Our group is broadly interested in understanding how metazoan cells fold complex proteins, and how the need to fold those proteins impacts their ability to evolve.
Rubisco is the most abundant protein on earth, catalysing photosynthetic CO2 fixation to provide all usable carbon in the biosphere. However, its slow and non-specific catalytic activity limits crop productivity and its resultant over-production represents a huge nitrogen cost.
The rust fungi (Pucciniales) comprise the largest order of plant pathogenic fungi and are among the most serious threats to both agricultural crops and natural ecosystems.
This seminar will explore photosynthetic strategies across diverse extreme environments, presenting case studies on cyanobacteria inhabiting marine oxygen deficient zones, algae growing within sea-ice and snow, and chemoautotrophic bacteria encased within ancient anoxic marine brines.