The SPS-CEPLAS Summer School 2024, united young scientists and researchers to address climate change through plant science. The Global Plant Council led a workshop on science communication for emphasizing the importance of conveying complex research to broader audiences effectively.
A chloroplast enzyme safeguards plants against pathological protein aggregation that causes Huntington’s and other neurodegenerative diseases / new research may have found a way to “copy” the mechanism for application in human cells.
Plants show enormous variety in traits relevant to breeding, such as plant height, yield and resistance to pests. One of the greatest challenges in modern plant research is to identify the differences in genetic information that are responsible for this variation. A research team has now developed a method to identify precisely these special differences in genetic information. Using the example of maize, they demonstrate the great potential of their method and present regions in the maize genome that may help to increase yields and resistance to pests during breeding.
A research team has been studying the current state of research on the plant colonization of land that occurred some 500 million years ago.
For plant breeding, it is important to create as many combinations as possible of genetic variants within a short time to select the most suitable candidates between plants with many different characteristics. A working group has now developed a method for using natural variations to identify what are referred to as ‘highly recombinogenic individuals’.
In the quest for more sustainable agriculture, improved crops with reduced photorespiration, a highly energy-consuming process, hold enormous potential. Researchers have now succeeded in developing a solution that connects photorespiration and C4 metabolism, two of the main targets for improving crop yield. This first proof of concept opens the door to plants with enhanced productivity and reduced consumption of resources.
Little is known about the vascular cells in leaves, in particular the phloem parenchyma. Two teams of plant researchers and bioinformatics researchers have succeeded for the first time in identifying the functions of the different cell types in the leaf vasculature of plants.
The genomes of all higher life forms are stored in the cell nucleus on chromosomes. Chromosomes are composed of strands of the DNA molecule. The genetic information itself is encoded in a sequence of adjacent base pairs of the molecules adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T).
An international team of researchers led by biologists has examined how seed formation is coordinated with fruit growth. In their report, they explain the genetic control mechanisms underlying the process. If you open up a pea pod, you will find that all of the peas inside are the same size and the same distance apart. The same is true of princess beans, runner beans and soybeans as well as various other peas and beans, and it also applies to non-pulses. This is surprising because both the seed size and number and the pod size differ substantially from one variety to the next.
Scientists have helped find a way to control different plant processes – such as when they grow – using nothing but coloured light.
