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Find out the latest news, announcements and stories about Biology at ANU.
- 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.
- RSB 50th Anniversary
In 1973, Lynn Dalgarno, from the ANU Department of Biochemistry, and his PhD student John Shine, proposed an initiating signal for protein synthesis in prokaryotic cells. This ribosomal binding site in bacterial messenger RNA became known as the Shine-Dalgarno (SD) sequence.
- RSB 50th Anniversary
Konzo is a neurological disease that causes irreversible paralysis of the legs, often in women and young children. It's caused by malnutrition and consumption of high levels of a cyanide compound found in the cassava plant - which happens to be a common staple food in tropical Africa.