News & events
News
Scientists at the Australian Research Council (ARC) ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis (CoETP) have found that some plants have ten times more communication channels inside their leaves than other plants, which they think is a crucial factor in determining photosynthetic efficiency.
ANU congratulates distinguished scientist and ANU Professor Graham Farquhar AO for being named the 2018 Senior Australian of the Year.
Photosynthesis is an essential biological process that depends on the activity of the enzyme Rubisco which catalyses carbon fixation. Rubisco is slow, inefficient and cannot accurately distinguish between CO2 and O2. ANU researchers have been trying to improve the efficiency of Rubisco in crop plants.
The investigations into carbon fixation and gas exchange by RSBS researchers were essential to the understanding of photosynthesis, and the development of new processes to increase the efficiency of the photosynthetic process in agriculture.
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.
Carboxysomes are polyhedral protein micro-compartments in cyanobacteria which concentrate CO2 and increase the efficiency of carbon fixation. In 1993, RSBS researchers Dean Price, Murray Badger and Susan Howitt determined the genetic sequence encoding for the proteins that form the protein shell of a carboxysome.
Events
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.