Plant Biology Seminar Series
Seminars from the RSB Division of Plant Sciences.
29
Mar
2023
12pm 29 March 2023
Nijat Imin, Assoc Professor Intensive Food Production, Western Sydney University
Nitrogen is a key determinant of crop productivity as the acquisition of nitrogen is crucial for photosynthesis and growth.
31
Mar
2023
3.30pm 31 March 2023
Pravin Khambalkar, PhD candidate Jones Group - Disease resistance
Fungal pathogens of crop plants are a major cause for yield loss and a critical concern for global food security.
06
Apr
2023
12pm 6 April 2023
Assoc Professor Danielle Way - Way Group - Plant Ecophysiology and Global Change Biology
Rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations could reach >1000 ppm by 2100, increasing global temperatures 3-4 °C. Both elevated CO2 and warming affect photosynthesis, altering plant growth, survival, and crop yield and quality.
Past events
29
Apr
2022
PS Seminar Series- JOINT SEMINAR - Moisture-regulated root branching »
Plants that exhibit moisture-regulated root branching, called hydropatterning, are able to detect spatial differences in water distribution around their root growth zone, which leads to pre-patterning of lateral root primordia towards regions of higher water availability.
22
Apr
2022
PS Seminar Series- PhD Exit Seminar- The flax-rust AvrP protein appears to be a bifunctional effector targeting both glucose and RNA metabolism in flax »
Rust diseases are a serious threat to cereals and other crops worldwide. The interaction between flax and the flax rust fungus, Melampsora lini, is a model pathosystem helping us to understand the molecular basis of rust fungal pathogenicity in plants.
30
Mar
2022
PS Seminar Series- Enhancing Rubisco catalysis improves plant growth »
The rate of photosynthesis and plant growth is often rate limited by the activity of the CO2-fixing enzyme Ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase (Rubisco).
25
Mar
2022
Joint Seminar : PS Seminar Series - Overview of ARC Discovery Project: Cereal blueprints for a water-limited world »
Plants are sessile organisms and are therefore unable to seek out environmental conditions optimal for their growth and development.
25
Mar
2022
Joint Seminar : PS Seminar Series - Integrating technologies to design future crops »
Plant scientists are in a race against time to adapt modern crops to future environments, many of which are predicted to be hotter and drier.
23
Mar
2022
PS Seminar Series - Creating synthetic gene circuits in plants »
Synthetic gene circuits are a new biotechnological framework for the generation of organisms harbouring user-defined gene expression patterns and other genetic functions.
02
Mar
2022
PS Seminar Series - Salicornia, a halophyte with untapped potential »
Given the global rates of freshwater depletion and the lack of replenishment in many regions including Saudi Arabia, the use of seawater as a primary source of irrigation for cropping may be our only viable option.
25
Feb
2022
PS Seminar Series - Tales from the transcriptome: Characterising FERONIA function through comparative gene expression analysis »
FERONIA (FER) is a plant receptor kinase of many functions, binding to pectin in the cell wall and mediating an astoundingly broad range of plant activities.
11
Feb
2022
PS Seminar Series: Challenges and opportunities in applying imaging and computer vision techniques to plant phenotyping »
Plant phenotyping methodologies have come a long way from manual scoring and destructive characterization to high-throughput imaging techniques.
10
Dec
2021
PS Webinar Series - PhD Exit Seminar: Plant hydration dynamics: measurement and uptake pathways »
Most water fluxes on the land occur through plants via transpiration, and agriculture uses 70% of the water managed by humans.
19
Nov
2021
PS Webinar Series: Can We Breed Crops For Unobserved Future Environments? »
Research interests - Working on developing new methods to combine information from corn, sorghum, and related orphan crops and wild species to identify genetic changes that alter crop traits important to farmers and food traits important to consumers.
17
Nov
2021
PS Webinar Series: The necrotrophic effector ToxA from Parastagonospora nodorum interacts with wheat NHL proteins to facilitate Tsn1-mediated necrosis »
The wheat necrotrophic fungal pathogen, Parastagonospora nodorum, secretes effector proteins to manipulate host immunity and promote successful infection.
10
Nov
2021
PS Webinar Series: The cellular biochemistry of the diatom pyrenoid »
The slow kinetics and poor substrate specificity of the key photosynthetic CO2-fixing enzyme Rubisco have prompted the repeated evolution of Rubisco containing compartments known as pyrenoids in diverse algal lineages and carboxysomes in prokaryotes.
29
Oct
2021
PS Webinar Series - PhD Exit Seminar: Using RNAseq to dissect virulence factors of wheat and barley pathogen Bipolaris sorokiniana »
Bipolaris sorokiniana is a hemibiotrophic pathogen causing spot blotch (SB) and common root rot (CRR) in both wheat and barley, and is causal to significant yield and economic losses.
20
Oct
2021
PS Webinar Series: The evolution of cell specific gene expression for C4 photosynthesis »
Prior to the discovery of C4 photosynthesis by Hal Hatch and Roger Slack in 1966 there were clues that some plants partitioned photosynthesis between specific leaf cell types.