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
One of society’s greatest challenges is sequestering vast amounts of carbon to avoid dangerous climate change without driving competition for land and resources.
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.
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.
The enzyme Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate Carboxylase/Oxygenase (RuBisCO) is responsible for the entry of atmospheric carbon into the biosphere during photosynthesis. Despite this key role, RuBisCO maintains several biochemical shortcomings, making it an attractive target for laboratory protein engineering.
Site-specific C-to-U RNA editing is a hallmark of plant organelle transcript maturation. Up to thousands of specific cytidines are converted into uridines in plant chloroplasts and mitochondria, with no evidence of editing activity in the cytosol.
Photorespiration (PR) is the pathway that detoxifies the product of the oxygenation reaction of Rubisco. It has been hypothesized that in dynamic light environments, PR provides a photoprotective function by serving as a sink for excess ATP and/or reducing equivalents.