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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

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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Tuesday, 18 Dec 2018

Fred Chow has dedicated his working life to the study of 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

A man in a blue polo shirt smiling at the camera with a beach and hills in the background.
23 Mar 2022 | 12pm

Synthetic gene circuits are a new biotechnological framework for the generation of organisms harbouring user-defined gene expression patterns and other genetic functions.

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A smiling woman with shoulder-length brown hair, wearing a white top, stands in front of a blue glass building.
2 Mar 2022 | 4pm

Given the global rates of freshwater depletion and the lack of replenishment in many regions including Saudi Arabia, the use of seawater as a primary source of irrigation for cropping may be our only viable option.

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A young man with glasses wearing a white lab coat smiling in a laboratory setting.
25 Feb 2022 | 3:30pm

FERONIA (FER) is a plant receptor kinase of many functions, binding to pectin in the cell wall and mediating an astoundingly broad range of plant activities.

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Portraits of a man in a blue shirt and a woman in a black top; the man's photo is in color, and the woman's is in black and white.
11 Feb 2022 | 3:30pm

Plant phenotyping methodologies have come a long way from manual scoring and destructive characterization to high-throughput imaging techniques.

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An illustration displaying scientific diagrams related to plant biology that includes a mechanical setup measuring plant response, multiple graph charts, and a close-up cross-section of plant cells.
10 Dec 2021 | 3:30 - 4:30pm

Most water fluxes on the land occur through plants via transpiration, and agriculture uses 70% of the water managed by humans.

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