News
Find out the latest news, announcements and stories about Biology at ANU.
- RSB 50th Anniversary
The early years of Biological Sciences at ANU are documented in 'The Making of The Australian National University' by Stephen Foster and Margaret Varghese.
- RSB 50th Anniversary
Legumes are an interesting plant to study due to their symbiotic relationship with nitrogen fixing bacteria called Rhizobia, which are housed within specialised root structures called nodules. The work of ANU researchers has been very important for our understanding of symbiosis, nodule formation and nitrogen fixation.
- RSB 50th Anniversary
The transformation of green, photosynthetic algae from their original simple aquatic life to advanced terrestrial plants was a key event in the history of planet Earth. An early achievement of RSBS was the identification of the extant representatives of the algae that accomplished this major evolutionary advance.
- RSB 50th Anniversary
Opuntia stricta (Prickly Pear) was introduced into Australia around 1840, but became a pest of epidemic proportions in the first two decades of the 20th century.
- Academic profile
In my research, I have been a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, which is well suited to teaching the large first year classes ranging in topics from evolution and ecology through to biochemistry and molecular biology.
- RSB 50th Anniversary
In the 1990s, Ian Morgan was working on retinal neurotransmitters, including dopamine, in RSBS. Every now and then, he came across a paper suggesting that dopamine could slow eye elongation and prevent myopia. This led to the discovery of a fascinating story.
- News
The Australian National University (ANU) Research School of Biology has awarded the inaugural Ralph Slatyer Medal for outstanding biological research to Professor Mark Westoby from Macquarie University.
- RSB 50th Anniversary
In 2000, Mandyam V. Srinivasan and colleagues showed that honeybees use the optical bypassing of the environment to measure distance. Srinivasan’s group trained bees to fly to food though a 6m tunnel lined with optical patterns. The bees overestimated the distance, communicating to other bees a distance of 200m.
- RSB 50th Anniversary
In 2015, for modelling photosynthesis, the world’s most important biological reaction, Graham Farquhar won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science.
- RSB 50th Anniversary
Hartnup disorder is a rare disorder that is caused by an inability to absorb the breakdown products of protein digestion, namely amino acids. In 2004, Stefan Bröer’s group discovered the gene that is mutated in Hartnup disorder, a transporter that mediates the absorption of amino acids in the intestine and kidney.