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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

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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19 Nov 2021 | 12 - 1pm

Research interests - Working on developing new methods to combine information from corn, sorghum, and related orphan crops and wild species to identify genetic changes that alter crop traits important to farmers and food traits important to consumers.

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17 Nov 2021 | 12 - 1pm

The wheat necrotrophic fungal pathogen, Parastagonospora nodorum, secretes effector proteins to manipulate host immunity and promote successful infection.

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"Portrait of a smiling man wearing glasses and a gray shirt."
10 Nov 2021 | 12 - 1pm

The slow kinetics and poor substrate specificity of the key photosynthetic CO2-fixing enzyme Rubisco have prompted the repeated evolution of Rubisco containing compartments known as pyrenoids in diverse algal lineages and carboxysomes in prokaryotes.

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