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.
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.
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.
Events
Most known examples of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) between eukaryotes are ancient. These events are identified primarily using phylogenetic methods on coding regions alone.
Zymoseptoria tritici is a host-specific necrotrophic pathogen, causing Septoria tritici blotch (STB) disease on wheat leaves. Although substantial efforts have been made to identify pathogenicity factors in Z. tritici, the genetic components contributing to the qualitative/quantitative virulence
Plant pathogens cause disease through secreted effector proteins, which act to modulate host physiology and promote infection. Often, effector proteins lack sequence identity to proteins of known function, or functional domains, making it impossible to infer function based on sequence alone.
The interactions of peptide ligands with leucine-rich repeat receptor-like kinases (LRR-RLKs) coordinate multiple plant biochemical pathways. Thus, there is a need for a simple method that identifies and validates peptide hormone-receptor pairings in vivo without disturbing native receptor complexes.
Photorespiratory metabolism is essential for plants to maintain functional photosynthesis in an oxygen-containing environment. Because the oxygenation reaction of Rubisco is followed by the loss of previously fixed carbon, photorespiration is often considered a wasteful process and considerable efforts are aimed at min
