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News

Tuesday, 05 Mar 2019

An international study has found a drought alarm system that first appeared in freshwater algae may have enabled plants to move from water to land more than 450 million years ago – a big evolutionary step that led to the emergence of land animals, including humans. 

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Tuesday, 29 Jan 2019

Human error, not human biology, largely accounts for the apparent decline of mortality among the very old, according to a new report by Saul Newman of the Research School of Biology, ANU. The result casts doubt on the hypothesis that human longevity can be greatly extended beyond current limits.

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Two people looking at a plant in a lab
Thursday, 24 Jan 2019

A scientific breakthrough intended to help boost the yields of food crops has solved a long-standing question of how cyanobacteria, known as blue-green algae, builds the carbon-capturing engines called carboxysomes in a protein liquid droplet formation.

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Tuesday, 18 Dec 2018

Fred Chow has dedicated his working life to the study of photosynthesis.

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Tuesday, 18 Dec 2018

Susanne von Caemmerer is recognised as a worldwide expert for using mathematics to represent the process by which plants convert sunlight, gases and water into sugars and oxygen – photosynthesis.

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Thursday, 13 Dec 2018

Sam Periyannan was born and brought up on a small sugar cane farm in Southern India. He never dreamed he would become a crop researcher, rather than a cane farmer.

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Events

Caitlin Moore
28 May 2025 | 12pm

The simultaneous measurement of meteorological variables along with ecosystem physiology has improved our understanding of how native and managed ecosystems respond to external forcings like climate change.

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Rowan Sage
7 May 2025 | 12pm

C4 photosynthesis is one of the most prolific complex traits in the biosphere, having independently evolved over 70 times in flowering plants. Understanding C4 evolution is providing insights into how evolution builds complex life forms that can transform the biosphere.

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Peter Reich
26 Mar 2025 | 12 - 1pm

Will ecosystems maintain their biodiversity and function under global environmental change, and continue to sequester carbon and slow climate change?

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Eric Dusenge
19 Mar 2025 | 12 - 1pm

Photosynthesis and leaf respiration are key metabolic processes for plant growth and their carbon exchange with the atmosphere are the largest within the global carbon cycle.

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A woman with curly hair, wearing a purple patterned top, stands smiling against a gray concrete background.
5 Mar 2025 | 12pm

Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is a spatial metabolomics technology used to map the distribution of metabolites in tissue cross sections or on surfaces of whole tissues.

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A collage of images featuring an illustrated woman holding a globe, surrounded by flowers on the left, a colorful map of the world in the center, and two satellite maps showing land use.
19 Feb 2025 | 12pm

A fundamental challenge in biology is dealing with high levels of heterogeneity, from genes in genomes, to developing tissues in an organism, to grass and trees in woodland biomes.

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