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 fungus Fusarium oxysporum causes devastating wilt diseases in plants.
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.
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.
Plant phenotyping methodologies have come a long way from manual scoring and destructive characterization to high-throughput imaging techniques.
Most water fluxes on the land occur through plants via transpiration, and agriculture uses 70% of the water managed by humans.
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.