Professor Barry Pogson, from the ANU Research School of Biology, was awarded $2.9 million to create higher-yielding and more resilient 'smart plants' for good and bad seasons.
Distinguished Professor Graham Farquhar has been honoured with a tapestry representing his life's work, including his Kyoto Prize, unveiled at University House.
Plant biologist and Head of the Plant Sciences Division at the ANU Research School of Biology, Professor Owen Atkin, has been named the 2019 Vice-Chancellor's Entrepreneurial Fellow for his work around entrepreneurial agri-technology.
To create a future you can look forward to we need to upgrade our crop plant resources. Upgrading crops to improve productivity and adapt to environmental stresses, such as extreme climatic conditions, is key to our future food security and quality of life.
Plant biotechnology predominantly relies on a restricted set of genetic parts with limited capability to customize spatiotemporal and conditional expression patterns.
As sessile organisms, plants have evolved a multitude of mechanisms to acclimate to their environment enabling the plant to optimise development and reproduction, and fight off or resist both biotic and abiotic stresses they may encounter through their life cycle.
C4 photosynthesis, a carbon concentrating mechanism, evolved as an adaptation to improve photosynthetic CO2 assimilation in terrestrial plants under conditions of low CO2, increased temperatures and varying rainfall patterns.
Cell-to-cell communication is essential for the co-ordination of responses in all multicellular organisms. One mechanism plants employ as defence against pathogens is restriction of cell-to-cell communication by plasmodesmata closure during infection.