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
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.
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.
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.
Rubisco is the most abundant protein on earth, catalysing photosynthetic CO2 fixation to provide all usable carbon in the biosphere. However, its slow and non-specific catalytic activity limits crop productivity and its resultant over-production represents a huge nitrogen cost.
The rust fungi (Pucciniales) comprise the largest order of plant pathogenic fungi and are among the most serious threats to both agricultural crops and natural ecosystems.
The Australian agrifood sector faces complex and multifaceted challenges to its continued growth and evolution, including a changing climate and geopolitical instability.