Find out about our latest news and events.

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. 

Read the article
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.

Read the article
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.

Read the article
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.

Read the article
Tuesday, 18 Dec 2018

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

Read the article
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.

Read the article

Events

A digital illustration of a molecular structure interacting with a larger, irregularly shaped protein on a dark background.
12 Feb 2025 | 12pm

The fungal pathogen, Magnaporthe oryzae, causes disease on many economically important cereal crops such as rice, wheat and barley.

Read the article
A man standing in front of a field of blooming flowers, wearing glasses and a black shirt.
10 Feb 2025 | 10am

Rust diseases significantly threaten cereals and other crops, causing substantial losses in crop production worldwide and endangering global food security.

Read the article
A bald man with glasses, wearing a navy blue suit jacket and a checked shirt, smiling at the camera with a green, leafy background.
7 Feb 2025 | 3:30pm

Mass Spectrometry Imaging (MSI) is an ex vivo approach used to map the distribution of biomolecules within thin sections of tissue.

Read the article
A headshot of a smiling man with short black hair, wearing a blue denim shirt, against a plain white background.
5 Feb 2025 | 12pm

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.

Read the article
Small flowers bloom among green foliage against a backdrop of gray rocks.
29 Jan 2025 | 12pm

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.

Read the article
A man with a beard, wearing a blue plaid shirt, smiles slightly while standing with folded arms and his reflection visible in a dark glass window.
14 Jan 2025 | 12pm

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.

Read the article