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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 group of nine diverse people smiling and posing in front of a colorful mural outdoors.
16 Oct 2023 | 12:30pm

Biodiversity rests on a foundation of adaptive and neutral variation within populations and species, that interact in communities or coexist in assemblages, to define ecosystems that provide habitat and life support services including a stable climate. New technologies span this biodiversity pyramid and allow rapid and

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Two images displaying molecular models: on the left, "AvrM14" labeled as an mRNA decapping effector in dark purple and gray shades; on the right, "MoNudix" described as a phosphate starvation inducing effector, shown in red, blue, and white with a multicolored molecule at the center.
13 Oct 2023 | 3:30pm

Agricultural crop production is continually challenged by plant-pathogenic fungi, jeopardizing global food security. Central to plant-fungal interactions are small proteins called effectors, which can be secreted by pathogens into plant cells to promote disease.

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A woman smiling at the camera with a traditional Japanese sliding door background.
28 Sep 2023 | 3:30pm

Jenny Mortimer is Associate Professor of Plant Synthetic Biology at the University of Adelaide, Australia, in the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine & The Waite Research Institute.

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A man in a lab coat and gloves holds a small plant with yellow flowers in a laboratory.
13 Sep 2023 | 12pm

One of society’s greatest challenges is sequestering vast amounts of carbon to avoid dangerous climate change without driving competition for land and resources.

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A man wearing glasses and a color-blocked sweater standing indoors and smiling at the camera.
6 Sep 2023 | 12pm

Photosynthesis and leaf respiration are key metabolic processes for plant growth and their carbon exchange with the atmosphere are the largest within the global carbon cycle.

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3D rendering of a complex protein structure with atoms represented by colored spheres against a gray background.
30 Aug 2023 | 12pm

Fungal pathogens are the main causative agents of disease in plants. Fusarium oxysporum is a diverse fungal pathogen able to infect a wide plant host range.

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