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.
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.
Fred Chow has dedicated his working life to the study of 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
Plants that exhibit moisture-regulated root branching, called hydropatterning, are able to detect spatial differences in water distribution around their root growth zone, which leads to pre-patterning of lateral root primordia towards regions of higher water availability.
Rust diseases are a serious threat to cereals and other crops worldwide. The interaction between flax and the flax rust fungus, Melampsora lini, is a model pathosystem helping us to understand the molecular basis of rust fungal pathogenicity in plants.
The rate of photosynthesis and plant growth is often rate limited by the activity of the CO2-fixing enzyme Ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase (Rubisco).
Plants are sessile organisms and are therefore unable to seek out environmental conditions optimal for their growth and development.
Plant scientists are in a race against time to adapt modern crops to future environments, many of which are predicted to be hotter and drier.
Synthetic gene circuits are a new biotechnological framework for the generation of organisms harbouring user-defined gene expression patterns and other genetic functions.