News & events
News
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.
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.
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.
Fred Chow has dedicated his working life to the study of photosynthesis.
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.
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.
Events
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.
In plants, microRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs of approximately 20-24 nt in length which are involved in post-transcriptional regulation of genes controlling many fundamental biological pathways.
Specialised metabolites are one of the major means of how microbes and sessile organisms express extended phenotype for the selective advantage of the organisms —or, more fundamentally, their genes.
Natural capital describes the stocks of renewable and non-renewable resources (e.g. plants, animals, air, water, soils and minerals) that produce flows of benefits to people.
Source-to-sink allocation of, and sink-to-sink competition for, photoassimilates, mainly in the form of sucrose, play a key role in determining energy and resource distribution in plants for growth and reproduction.