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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 man with a beard smiling in front of greenery, wearing a floral shirt.
31 Jul 2020 | 12pm

The interaction of C-TERMINALLY ENCODED PEPTIDES (CEPs) with CEP RECEPTOR1 (CEPR1) controls root growth and development, as well as nitrate uptake, but has no known role in determining yield.

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A smiling man wearing a dark suit and a striped blue tie.
29 Jul 2020 | 12pm

This seminar will discuss the terabytes of unused satellite data that observe the natural world, yet have not been widely used for field biology, in the context of agriculture.

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A woman smiling at the camera with a green, leafy background.
22 Jul 2020 | 12pm

Silencing of transposable elements (TEs) is essential for maintaining genome stability. Plants use small RNAs (sRNAs) to direct DNA methylation to TEs (RNA-directed DNA methylation; RdDM). Similar mechanisms of epigenetic silencing in the fungal kingdom have remained elusive.

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A collage of three images showing a woman giving a presentation, two women interacting in a plant-filled office, and two colleagues in lab coats discussing work in a laboratory.
17 Jul 2020 | 12pm

This research project investigates how photoassimilates moves from source leaves to other sink tissues that accumulate large amounts of carbohydrates. Many sinks such as stem and seeds/grains rely on the accumulation of sugars and starch during their development as they mature and become storage tissue.

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A woman with glasses smiling at the camera, with a historic clock tower and a modern building in the background on a sunny day.
1 Jul 2020 | 12pm

Most known examples of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) between eukaryotes are ancient. These events are identified primarily using phylogenetic methods on coding regions alone.

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A man standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge on a sunny day.
26 Jun 2020 | 12pm

Zymoseptoria tritici is a host-specific necrotrophic pathogen, causing Septoria tritici blotch (STB) disease on wheat leaves. Although substantial efforts have been made to identify pathogenicity factors in Z. tritici, the genetic components contributing to the qualitative/quantitative virulence

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