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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 smiling at the camera while wearing a backpack and sunglasses, standing in front of a scenic mountainous landscape.
12 Aug 2020 | 12pm

Many photosynthetic organisms employ a CO2 concentrating mechanism (CCM) to increase the rate of CO2 fixation via the Calvin cycle. CCMs catalyze ≈50% of global photosynthesis, yet it remains unclear which genes and proteins are necessary for a CCM to function.

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A woman with her hair in a braid smiles gently in front of a large green plant.
7 Aug 2020 | 12pm

C-TERMINALLY ENCODED PEPTIDES (CEPs) interact with the CEPR1 receptor to control nitrate uptake and primary root growth, however the role of CEP-CEPR1 signalling in controlling overall root system architecture is unknown.

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A woman in a lab coat smiling at the camera next to a small potted plant, with fluorescent lights above.
5 Aug 2020 | 4:30pm

Disease resistance is mediated by recognition of pathogen avriulence effectors (AVR) through host nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat receptors (NLR).

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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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