An international research team has found they can increase corn productivity by targeting the enzyme in charge of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Scientists at ANU have engineered tiny carbon-capturing engines from blue-green algae into plants, in a breakthrough that promises to help boost the yields of important food crops such as wheat, cowpeas and cassava.
The ANU and CSIRO will set up a new farming innovation centre at ANU to advance research, education and technology in farming and global food production, thanks to more than $1 million in new funding commitments.
Simon Williams uses protein biochemistry and structural biology approaches to understand how plant pathogens cause disease and how the plant immune system prevents infection.
Plant biotechnology predominantly relies on a restricted set of genetic parts with limited capability to customize spatiotemporal and conditional expression patterns.
As sessile organisms, plants have evolved a multitude of mechanisms to acclimate to their environment enabling the plant to optimise development and reproduction, and fight off or resist both biotic and abiotic stresses they may encounter through their life cycle.
C4 photosynthesis, a carbon concentrating mechanism, evolved as an adaptation to improve photosynthetic CO2 assimilation in terrestrial plants under conditions of low CO2, increased temperatures and varying rainfall patterns.
Cell-to-cell communication is essential for the co-ordination of responses in all multicellular organisms. One mechanism plants employ as defence against pathogens is restriction of cell-to-cell communication by plasmodesmata closure during infection.