GPC Community Archives - Page 4 of 6 - The Global Plant Council

Apr 11

A year at the Global Plant Council

By Isabel | ASPB, Blog, GPC Community

Last April I joined the Global Plant Council as a New Media Fellow along with Sarah Jose from the University of Bristol. The GPC is a small organization with a big remit: to bring together stakeholders in the plant and crop sciences from around the world! As New Media Fellows, Sarah and I have have assisted in raising the online profile of the GPC through various social media platforms. We wrote about our experiences in growing this blog and the GPC Twitter and Facebook accounts in the The Global Plant Council Guide to Social Media, which details our successes and difficulties in creating a more established online presence.

Why do it?

My wheat growing in Norfolk field trials. I have spent every summer for the past 3 years out here analysing photosynthesis and other possible contributors to crop yield

I chose to apply for the fellowship during the third year of my PhD. Around this time I had started to consider that perhaps a job in research wasn’t for me. It was therefore important to gain experience outside of my daily life in the lab and field, explore possible careers outside of academia and of course to add vital lines to my CV. I still loved science, and found my work interesting, so knew I wanted to stay close to the scientific community. Furthermore, I had always enjoyed being active on Twitter, and following scientific blogs, so the GPC fellowship sounded like the perfect opportunity!

The experience

I think I can speak for both Sarah and myself when I say that this fellowship has been one of the best things I’ve done during my PhD. Managing this blog for a year has allowed me to speak to researchers working on diverse aspects of the plant sciences from around the world. My speed and writing efficiency have improved no end, and I can now write a decent 1000 word post in under an hour! I discovered the best places to find freely available photos, and best way to present a WordPress article. Assisting with Twitter gave me an excuse to spend hours reading interesting articles on the web – basically paid procrastination – and I got to use my creativity to come up with new ways of engaging our community.

Filming interviews at the Stress Resilience Forum. Next career move, camera woman?

Of course going to Brazil for the Stress Resilience Symposium, GPC AGM and IPMB was a highlight of my year. I got to present to the international community both about my own PhD research and the work of the GPC, Sarah and I became expert camera women while making the Stress Resilience videos, and I saw the backstage workings of a conference giving out Plantae badges on the ASPB stand at IPMB. It didn’t hurt that I got to see Iguassu Falls, drink more than a few caipirinhas and spend a sneaky week in Rio de Janeiro!

Helping out on the ASPB stand with Sarah

Thank you

Working with the GPC team has been fantastic. I learnt a lot about how scientific societies are run and the work they do by talking to the representatives from member societies at the AGM. The executive board have been highly supportive of our activities throughout. Last but not least, the lovely GPC ladies, Ruth, Lisa and Sarah have been an amazing team to work with – I cannot thank you enough!

I have now handed in my PhD, left the GPC, and moved on to a new career outside of academic research. I’m going into a job focused on public engagement and widening access to higher education, and have no doubt my GPC experiences have helped me get there. My advice if you’re unsure about where you want to end up after your PhD? Say “yes” to all new opportunities as you never know where they will take you.

Thank you the GPC! Hopefully I’ll be back one day!

Thank you! It’s been amazing!

Mar 30

The importance of botanic gardens in the 21st century

By Isabel | Blog, GPC Community, Public Engagement

Image credit: Tom Paxton

It felt particularly fitting to travel to a plant science workshop in Japan, home of hanami, the ancient celebration of the beauty of flowers. Researchers from Heidelberg University, Germany; Kyoto University, Japan; and the University of Bristol, UK, met to discuss their cutting edge research in a meeting aptly titled ‘Novel Frontiers in Botany’.

Plant science at all three of these universities is enhanced by their botanic gardens. Heidelberg’s sounded especially impressive: established in 1593, it boasts over 10,000 species! As a former employee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK), which was recently threatened with a £5 million cut in government spending, I started thinking how important botanic gardens such as these are as vital tools for research, conservation, education and recreation.

Research

Kyoto University Botanic Gardens. Image credit: Sarah Jose

Botanic gardens are focused pools of amazing expertise in horticulture, taxonomy and ethnobotany, and this knowledge is constantly growing. Plant collections at Kyoto, Heidelberg and Bristol botanic gardens are continuously being visited by researchers studying almost all aspects of plant science. Some of the rarest species in the world can be cultivated and studied in botanic gardens without damaging wild populations; others are investigated for potential medicinal properties, evolution is studied by building banks of DNA, and we can get a fantastic overview of the diversity of life, from the microscopic structures of pollen to the architecture of trees.

Ex situ conservation

In the same way that zoos protect endangered species, botanic gardens around the world host and preserve at least a third of all known species of flowering plants.

Wollemi pine pollen cone. Image credit: Velella. Used under license: CC BY-SA 3.0.

One of my favorite examples is the wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis). Plant nerds like me will know that the wollemi pine was only known from 2 million-year-old fossils until field officer David Noble discovered around 100 plants growing at Wollemi National Park, Australia. These living fossils were propagated by botanic gardens in Australia and internationally, and are now a popular tree in cultivation around the world.

Another important facet of ex situ conservation is the creation of seed banks. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, established the Millennium Seed Bank in 1996, which aims to provide an ‘insurance policy’ against extinction by storing the seeds of 25% of all seed-bearing plants. The majority of the stored 75,000 species will be rare or threatened with extinction.

In situ conservation

As well as bolstering plant species on their own sites, many botanic gardens are involved in restoration projects of damaged ecosystems around the world. Botanic Gardens Conservation International, a global network for botanic gardens, describes many such efforts including the restoration of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest by the Rio de Janeiro Botanic Garden, the restoration of local upland forest by Kenya’s Brackenhurst Botanic Garden, and Hawaiian beach and coastal restoration by the US National Tropical Botanic Garden. In each case, rare and endemic species of plant replaced invasive species and increased the biodiversity of the entire ecosystem.

Education and recreation

Botanic gardens often hold events, like the Easter sculpture festival at the University of Bristol Botanic Gardens. Image credit: Sarah Jose

Botanic gardens are a great place for an afternoon stroll with the family, which plays nicely into their ulterior motive: education. Plants are amazing but they are often overlooked. By displaying the most wonderful and fascinating species from around the world, botanic gardens kindle an interest in plants from the general public, as well as potentially teaching children where food comes from, or fostering a love of nature and the environment.

It doesn’t stop there though. As well as restoration projects, which often include local people who learn about the economic importance of preserving their native ecosystems, the gardens can be involved in broader efforts. For example, the National Museums of Kenya are looking to develop a botanic garden. The garden will facilitate the transfer and accumulation of ethnobotanical knowledge surrounding the relationships between the Kenyan people and their local plant species; useful information that will also promote the importance of conserving their local flora.

In conclusion

Botanic gardens are integral to the study and appreciation of a wide range of plant taxa, and their importance should not be underestimated. Too many people view them as outdated and push to cut their funding, but we need to show that dynamic and cutting edge research, as well as public appreciation for plants and the environment, relies on their continuation both now and in the future.

Feb 12

Flowers of the Global Plant Council

By Isabel | Blog, GPC Community

A while ago we published a blog post about the sequencing of the Bauhinia genome. Bauhinia x blakeana is the national flower of Hong Kong, so naturally this sparked our interest in the global importance of flowers as national symbols, such as the English rose. Here we list just a few of the more interesting and unusual plants that are the national symbols of countries hosting GPC member organizations.

India Indian Society for Plant Physiology

Nelumbo nucifera

The Lotus Plant (Nelumbo nucifera) is an aquatic plant in the Nelumbonaceae family, and is the national flower of India and Vietnam. Image by alterna used under Creative Commons 2.0.

The lotus plant (Nelumbo nucifera) is considered sacred in the Buddhist and Hindu religions, and been used for over 7000 years in Asia as a source of food, herbal remedy and fibers for clothing. In 2013 its genome was sequenced, allowing its phylogenetic history and adaptations for the aquatic environment to be more fully understood. For example, the plant has a number of genes enabling its adaptation to the nutrient poor soils in waterways, altering its novel root growth, iron regulation and phosphate starvation.

Researchers at the University of Adelaide, Australia, showed that the lotus actually has the ability to regulate the temperature of its flowers, maintaining them between 30 and 36 °C even when air temperature dropped below this. Quite how or why it does this is still unknown, but warmer flowers could play a role in attracting cold-blooded insects and increasing their activity once on the flowers to enhance pollination. An alternative explanation could be that warmer temperatures are required for pollen production.

Another fantastic fact about the lotus is seed viability. A 1300 year old lotus fruit found in a dry lakebed in China was successfully germinated, providing an insight into the aging process of fruits and other organisms

Australia Australian Society of Plant Scientists

Acacia pycnantha

The golden wattle (Acacia pycnantha) is a member of the Fabaceae family. The plant is a small tree that can grow up to 12 meters high! In Australia the 1st September is National Wattle Day. Image by Sydney Oats used under Creative Commons 2.0.

The Australian national flower is the Acacia pycnantha, or wattle, first described in 1942. Its name comes from the Greek pyknos (dense) and anthos (flowers) describing the dense groups of flowers that form on the tree. The wattle is an important source of tannins, and as such has been introduced to parts of southern Europe such as Italy and Portugal in addition to India and New Zealand. The wattle is also found in South Africa where it has now become an invasive pest, and various methods of biological control such as gall forming wasps (Trichilogaster signiventris) are being used to control populations.

Galls on a wattle tree from T. signiventris. Eggs are laid by the wasp in the buds of flower heads and the hatched larvae induce gall formation which prevents flower development. This in turn prevents pollination and continued propagation of the Wattle population. Image by Sydney Oats used under Creative Commons 2.0.

Japan The Japanese Society of Plant Physiologists

Yellow Chrysanthemum

The yellow Chrysanthemum is a member of the Asteraceae family. Species of the Chrysanthemum enus are popular ornamental plants, and as such many hybrids and thousands of cultivars in a variety of colors and shapes can be found. Image by Joe deSousa used under Creative Commons 1.0.

Although cherry blossom is often the flower most associated with Japan, yellow Chrysanthemum flowers are equally as important. The flower is used as the Imperial Seal of Japan and on the cover of Japanese passports. Species of the genus Chrysanthemum are members of the Asteraceae (daisy) family.

Two species of the Chrysanthemum genus, C. cinerariifolium and C. coccineum, synthesize pyrethrum compounds, which attack insect nervous systems. As such these species make good companion plants in the field, repelling insects from economically valuable neighboring plants that do not have their own defense mechanisms. The naturally produced toxins are widely used in organic farming, and many synthetic versions are also available commercially.

South Africa African Crop Science Society

Protea cynaroides

The king protea (Protea cynaroides) is a member of the Proteaceae family and the national flower of South Africa. The South African cricket team has the nickname the Proteas, after the flower. Image by Virginia Manso, used under Creative Commonds 2.0.

The king protea (Protea cynaroides) can grow up to 2 meters in height and comes in several colors and varieties. The plant grows in harsh, dry regions prone to wildfire, and as such has a number of adaptations for the environment. For example, a long tap-root is used for accessing deep water, and tough leathery leaves are resilient to both biotic and abiotic stress. The protea has a thick underground stem with many dormant buds. After a wildfire these dormant buds can become active, forming new stems allowing the plant to survive!

The king protea is only one species within the large Proteaceae family, 120 species of which are now endangered listed on the IUCN Red List of threatened species. The Protea Atlas Project aims to map the geographical location of proteas through Southern Africa in order to help preserve the family. In addition to protea, Southern Africa is home to around 24 000 plant taxa, 80% of which occur no where else in the world. A wider objective of the Protea Atlas Project is to map species-richness patterns in Southern Africa. The distribution of Protea plants within the region largely seems to match the species-richness patterns of other plant species, and therefore proteas are being used as surrogates for plant diversity. Find out more about the project and get involved here.

Germany and Estonia EUCARPIA, EPSO, FESPB, SPPS

Centaurea cyanus

The cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) is a member of the Asteraceae family, like the Chrysanthemum. Image by Anita used under Creative Commons 2.0.

We have a large number of European and Scandinavian member groups, and choosing one flower to represent all of those was a challenge. However, the humble Cornflower seemed an appropriate choice to represent our European societies. This member of the daisy family is not only the national flower of Germany and Estonia, but has a place in many Scandinavian cultures being the symbol for a number of political parties in Finland and Sweden.

In the past this beautiful flower was regarded as a weed, but now due to intensive agricultural practices has become endangered. Cornflowers have many uses in addition to being an ornamental plant. The plant is used in many blends of herbal tea, flowers are edible in salads, and the blue coloring can be used as a clothes dye.

Canada Canadian Society of Plant Biologists

Acer

Although not technically a flower, the leaf of the maple tree is such an iconic symbol on the Canadian flag we just had to include it (we are the Global Plant Council after all). There are many species of maple tree in the genus Acer, which can be distinguished from other genus of trees by their distinctive leaf shape. The most important species of maple in Canada is probably Acer saccharum, the sugar maple. The sap of this species is the major source of maple syrup, and its hard wood is popular for use in flooring and furniture.

Acer saccharum, the sugar maple, in Autumn. Image by Mark K. used under Creative Commons 2.0.

The sugar maple grows throughout the USA and Canada, favoring cooler climates and is a very shade tolerant species. Despite this, the sugar maple is now in decline in many regions. It is highly susceptible to increased levels of air pollution and changes to salt levels. As such the species is now being replaced in many regions by the hardier Norway Maple.

Argentina Argentinian Society of Plant Physiology

Erythrina crista-galli

E. crista-galli, the cockspur coral tree, is the national tree in Argentina. Also known in Argentina as the ceibo, the bright red flower of this tree is also the national flower of Argentina and Uruguay.

The bright red flowers of E.crista-galli are the national flowers of Argentina and Uruguay. Image by Gabriella F.Ruellan used under Creative Commons 2.0.

The small tree is a legume from the family Fabaceae. Characteristically of species from this family, the fruit of the cockspur coral tree are dry pods, and the roots have nodules containing nitrogen fixing bacteria making them important for increasing the available nitrogen in the soil. Although native to South America, the tree is also naturalized in Australia, where it is becoming an emerging environmental weed. The tree is invading waterways and wetlands displacing native species, and its spread is now being controlled in New South Wales.

If your country has a particularly interesting national flower that we have missed let us know! Perhaps we can include it in a future blog post.

Jan 07

New Year, New Executive Board

By Isabel | Blog, Future Directions, GPC Community

Happy New Year!

Although they’ve actually been in post since our Annual General Meeting (AGM) in October 2015, I thought I’d take this opportunity to introduce you to our new(ish!) Executive Board; the elected committee of plant science experts from around who help Ruth and myself, and Bill our President, to direct and drive the GPC’s activities and initiatives.

Barry Pogson – Chair

Aussie Barry is stepping into the (very large!) shoes of our outgoing Chair, Willi Gruissem. Barry is no stranger to the GPC, having been a GPC Member Organization representative of the Australian Society of Plant Scientists since the GPC’s inception, and being the lead on our Biofortification initiative.

In the lab, based at the Australian National University in Canberra, Barry explores the signaling pathways between chloroplasts and nuclei, particularly investigating how these can impact plants’ tolerance to drought, and carotenoid synthesis and accumulation. His work has important implications for plant biology as a whole, but also for human nutrition, particularly in the biofortification of crops as a means to reduce micronutrient deficiencies.

Barry is Chair of the Golden Rice Technical Advisory Committee and has won numerous awards for his research, teaching and supervision excellence. You can read more about Barry on the GPC website.

Ariel Orellana – Vice Chair

Ariel replaces outgoing Vice-Chair Henry Nguyen. A Professor of Plant Biotechnology at the Universidad Andrés Bello in Santiago, Chile, Ariel has also been involved with the GPC for a number of years as a representative of Chile’s National Network of Plant Biologists, and we look forward to continuing to work with him as a key point of contact in South America.

A highly decorated scientist with many awards, titles, and attributions to his name, Ariel’s research interests are in plant cell wall polysaccharide biosynthesis in the Golgi, particularly looking at the contribution of nucleotide sugar transporters, and he also uses genomics as a tool for the marker-assisted breeding of fruit.

Vicky Buchanan-Wollaston – Treasurer

Vicky joins the GPC Executive Board as our new Treasurer, taking over control of the purse-strings from Brazil’s Gustavo Habermann.

Vicky is Emeritus Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of Warwick, UK, where her research interests are focused on plant senescence, using both Arabidopsis and vegetable Brassicas to carry out functional analysis of leaf senescence-regulating genes. She is a GPC Member Organization representative for the Society for Experimental Biology, and with Professor Jim Beynon, leads the GPC’s initiative on Stress Resilience. Read more about Vicky here.

Carl Douglas – Board Member

Now joining us as Board Member – together with Yusuke Saijo (below) replacing former Board Members Kasem Ahmed and Zhihong Xu, Carl is also a GPC Member Organization representative for the Canadian Society of Plant Biologists (CSPB). He works at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he is a Professor in the Department of Botany. He leads research exploring plant cell wall biosynthesis, and is an expert in tree genomics.

A highly cited and well published author, Carl is also a former President of the CSPB, a Corresponding Member of the American Society of Plant Biologists, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. You can find out a bit more about Carl here.

Yusuke Saijo – Board Member

As well as being a newly elected GPC Board Member, Yusuke Saijo is also new to the GPC, replacing his predecessor Takashi Ueda as the Member Organization representative for the Japanese Society of Plant Physiologists.

His lab work at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan is focused on understanding plant–microbe interactions, particularly plants’ ability to sense danger, undergo transcriptional reprogramming and priming, and the control of plant immunity under fluctuating environmental conditions.

Thank you

Huge thanks to our outgoing Board Members – Wilhelm Gruissem, Henry Nguyen, Gustavo Habermann, Kasem Ahmed and Zhihong Xu – for all their hard work and support during their terms.

And don’t forget…

The members of the GPC’s Executive Board are an elected subset of the Council’s representatives from professional plant, crop, environmental and agricultural societies from all over the world. But, if you are a member of one of our Member Organizations, you’re also a part of the GPC community! We encourage you to get in touch with your GPC representative, especially if you would like to get involved with our activities, or if you have any ideas as to how we can help filter the GPC’s news and information down from the Council to your society’s individual members.

You can find a full list of our member societies, their reps, and their contact details here.

Finally, if your society or professional association is not already a member of the GPC and would like to be, we’d love to hear from you! Please contact us at info@globalplantcouncil.org.

Jan 01

2015 Plant Science Round Up

By Isabel | Blog, GPC Community, Research

Following on from last week’s post, Now That’s What I Call Plant Science 2015, we bring you a year in Plant Science!

January

Image credit: Jean Weber. Used under license CC BY 2.0.

The year began with a surprising paper that turned our understanding of the phytohormone auxin on its head. Researchers in China and the USA created Arabidopsis knockout mutants of AUXIN BINDING PROTEIN 1 (ABP1), expecting them to fail to respond to auxin and have developmental defects, as previously seen in the abp1-1 knockdown mutant. Instead, these plants were indistinguishable from wild type plants, leading the authors to conclude that ABP1 is not required for auxin signaling or Arabidopsis development as previously believed.

Read the paper in PNAS: Auxin binding protein 1 (ABP1) is not required for either auxin signaling or Arabidopsis development.

A paper later in the year from the same authors found that the embryonic lethality of the abp1-1 mutant is actually caused by the off-target linked deletion of the adjacent BSM gene.

Read this paper in Nature Plants: Embryonic lethality of Arabidopsis abp1-1 is caused by deletion of the adjacent BSM gene.

The tale of ABP1 was examined in more detail on the GARNet blog, Weeding the Gems, which concluded: “In many ways this story is an excellent example of how science should work, where claims are independently tested to ensure that earlier experiments have been conducted or interpreted correctly.” Click here to read more.

February

A clever experiment from Germany led to a significant breakthrough in crop protection from insect pests.

When double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) is present within a eukaryotic cell, it is cleaved by the Dicer enzyme to form short interfering RNAs. These can bind to complementary RNA within a cell to target it for destruction, thus silencing the corresponding gene expression. This process is known as RNA interference (RNAi).

RNAi has previously been used to tackle insect herbivory by expressing insect-specific dsRNA in plants; however the protection has previously been incomplete. In this new study, published in Science, researchers produced dsRNA within chloroplasts, which do not have RNAi machinery. When dsRNA is expressed in the cytoplasm, the plant’s own Dicer enzyme breaks most of it down. When expressed in the chloroplasts, the dsRNA remained intact when eaten by insects, which proved much more effective at killing these pests.

Read the paper here: Full crop protection from an insect pest by expression of long double-stranded RNAs in plastids.

March

Another crop protection study followed in March, when researchers in China cloned the genetic locus in rice that confers broad-spectrum resistance to planthoppers – insect pests that cause the loss of billions of dollars of crops per year. Three lectin receptor kinase genes were found in rice cultivars from the Philippines, which enable plants to survive an infestation of insects. When cloned into a susceptible rice cultivar, these genes conferred resistance to two different planthopper species.

Understanding the genetic basis of resistance is very important as marker-assisted breeding and selection could be used to develop resistant rice varieties, and potentially utilized in other species of cereal.

Read the paper in Nature Biotechnology: A gene cluster encoding lectin receptor kinases confers broad-spectrum and durable insect resistance in rice

April

A European collaboration led to the development of 3DCellAtlas, a computational approach that semi-automatically identifies cell types in a developing 3D organ without the need for transgenic lineage markers. This program will enable the interpretation of dynamic organ growth and the spatial and temporal context of developmental cell divisions that produce the resultant plant. It could be integrated with growth in different conditions or with developmental mutants to examine exactly how these processes affect growth in 3D.

Image credit: Montenegro-Johnson et al., 2015. Digital Single-Cell Analysis of Plant Organ Development Using 3DCellAtlas. The Plant Cell, vol. 27 no. 4, 1018–1033.

May

A special issue of the Plant Biotechnology Journal was published in May, focusing on the amazing advances in molecular farming. While the entire issue is worth delving into, we were particularly intrigued by the review on moss-made pharmaceuticals, which outlines the rapid progress made in the field.

The model moss Physcomitrella patens has rapidly become one of the organisms of choice in biotechnology, with a fully sequenced genome and an outstanding toolbox for genome-engineering. The authors describe how moss-made pharmaceuticals can easily be produced while remaining remarkably more stable from batch to batch than cultured animal cells. The system is easily scalable, making their production highly cost effective, and safe. The first moss-made pharmaceuticals are currently in clinical trials, so keep an eye out for much more from this field over the next few years.

Read the review: Moss-made pharmaceuticals: from bench to bedside.

June

In June, US researchers discovered a new role for chloroplast stromules, protrusions that extend from the surface of all plastid types. The function of stromules has been difficult to determine, but this research, published in Developmental Cell, suggests that they may provide a mechanism by which plastid signals are conveyed to the nucleus. The paper shows that chloroplast stromules are induced by defense responses such as programmed cell death signaling, and that the stromules extend to form dynamic connections with the nucleus. The stromules may therefore aid in the amplification and/or transport of immune response signals into the nucleus.

Read the paper: Chloroplast Stromules Function during Innate Immunity.

July

Image credit: Veresoglou et al., 2015. Self-DNA: a blessing in disguise? New Phytologist, vol. 207, no. 3, 488–490.

In late 2014 and early 2015, Italian researchers published a set of articles showing that extracellular self-DNA, DNA from conspecifics, could inhibit the growth of organisms from a wide range of taxa, including plants, bacteria, fungi and animals. Conversely, these organisms were not affected by extracellular DNA from other unrelated species.

In July, New Phytologist published a letter offering an interpretation of the data as it relates to plants. Plants could interpret extracellular self-DNA as an indicator of intraspecific competition (which seeds could use as a cue to remain dormant) or of a hostile environment that has already caused the death of conspecifics, signaling them to ramp up their pre-emptive immune response to increase survival after neighbors have been damaged or killed. There are still a lot of mechanisms and ecological effects to be investigated in this new field, but this letter suggests several interesting avenues to investigate.

Read the article: Self-DNA: a blessing in disguise?

Original research papers in New Phytologist:

Inhibitory and toxic effects of extracellular self-DNA in litter: a mechanism for negative plant–soil feedbacks?

Inhibitory effects of extracellular self-DNA: a general biological process?

August

A US study in August revealed a surprising degree of conservation in gene expression patterns across a wide range of plant taxa during root development. This was particularly interesting because the spikemoss Selaginella was shown to use many of the same genes as the evolutionarily distant angiosperms, despite the fossil record suggesting that roots evolved independently in these two lineages. Perhaps roots in these two groups evolved by independently recruiting the same developmental program, or perhaps by elaborating on a previously unknown proto-root that existed in the common ancestor of vascular plants.

Read the paper in The Plant Cell: Conserved Gene Expression Programs in Developing Roots from Diverse Plants.

September

Salt stress can significantly reduce the growth and yield of plants. Researchers in Germany identified two components of the cellulose synthase complex that directly interact with the microtubules and promote their dynamics, which interestingly were highly produced during salt stress conditions. During salt stress, cellulose microtubules depolymerize, however the newly discovered compounds, known as Companions of Cellulose Synthase, promote the reassembly of the microtubule to allow cellulose synthesis to continue.

Read the paper in Cell: A Mechanism for Sustained Cellulose Synthesis during Salt Stress

October

Throughout the year the GM debate in Europe reached several important milestones. In January the European Union (EU) changed its rules, giving individual countries more flexibility to decide for themselves whether or not to plant GM crops. In February, the UK Science and Technology Committee report stated that EU regulations preventing GM crops are not fit for purpose, and that they should be replaced with a trait-based system.

In October, EU member states revealed their stances on GM crops, with over half of Europe opting out of growing GM crops. Germany was the largest country to opt out of growing GM. The full list can be viewed here: Restrictions of geographical scope of GMO.

Read the news articles here:

EU changes rules on GM crop cultivation – January 2015

EU regulation on GM Organisms not ‘fit for purpose’ – February 2015

Half of Europe opts out of new GM crop scheme – October 2015

November

Image credit: University of Warwick, UK.

A collaboration between South African and UK scientists revealed how plants can use their circadian clock to pre-emptively boost their immune resistance at dawn, when fungal infection is most likely. Plants tend to decrease in susceptibility at dawn, but those with dysfunctional circadian clocks remained highly susceptible throughout the day. The research also showed that jasmonate signaling plays a crucial role in the circadian timing of resistance.

Read the article in The Plant Journal: Jasmonate signalling drives time-of-day differences in susceptibility of Arabidopsis to the fungal pathogen Botrytis cinerea.

December

Image credit: Guo & Liu., 2015. A single-nucleotide exon found in Arabidopsis. Scientific Reports, 5:18087.

Researchers in China published the surprising finding that a single-nucleotide exon exists in the APC11 gene in Arabidopsis. This is the smallest exon ever to be discovered before. The team used an elegant set of APC11-GFP constructs to show that intron splicing around the single-nucleotide exon is effective in both Arabidopsis and rice. This finding has implications for future genome annotations, which might reveal many more single-nucleotide exons.

Read the paper in Scientific Reports: A single-nucleotide exon found in Arabidopsis.

What a wonderful year of science! What new knowledge will 2016 bring?

Jan 01

Plant scientists respond: “Plants are boring!”

By Isabel | Blog, GPC Community

Throughout my PhD, I often found myself explaining why plants are fascinating, justifying why I was devoting four years of my life to researching the minute details of their biology.

A few weeks ago, I thought I’d ask the #plantsci community on Twitter what makes them love plants. The response was phenomenal, so I thought I’d share it here as a fun way to transition to 2017!

(This is just a handful of the huge number of comments. To read them all, click here.)

Hey #plantsci, I need your help! What makes you love plants? What’s your comeback to “plants are boring”? Thanks! Plz RT! @PlantTeaching 😉

— Sarah Jose (@JoseSci) November 9, 2016

Many of us are amazed by the fact that they can fend for themselves, rather than running away from harsh conditions or predators:

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching Plants have to deal with many of the same struggles as animals – and they can’t even run away. — Alice Foxall (@alicefoxall) November 13, 2016

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching They’re incredibly resilient and adaptive all without having a nervous system or being able to move!

— Silvia Caldararu (@SCaldararu) November 10, 2016

@JoseSci @DJPMoore Plants survive and thrive in places most humans would never dare even to visit. — Tom Buckley (@TomBuckleyLab) November 10, 2016

@JoseSci forever plastic and survive in the situation wherever they lay their roots. Not denying that’s cool!

— Kelly (@kaatkins7) November 10, 2016

Don’t worry though, because plants can fight back:

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching my tree was attacked by aphids. It released a sweet liquid that attracted ants, chasing away the aphids! — Allen Greeley (@taku2473allen) November 9, 2016

They can alter their environments in really interesting ways too:

@JoseSci @SCIHorticulture @PlantTeaching exudates – active modification of rhizosphere to block toxins entering roots and mobilise nutrients

— Mark Nason (@Cornwall_SciEnv) November 9, 2016

A lot of people are interested in plant reproduction:

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching #Plant sex lives (reproductive life cycles) are so much more complex than ours. Animal life cycles are boring. — Eve Emshwiller (@EveEmshwiller) November 10, 2016

@JoseSci @Botanical_ @PlantTeaching look at all of those reproductive strategies. Plants are truly amazing!

— The Morris Lab @MTSU (@themorrislab) November 9, 2016

Some species can survive for millennia:

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching even relatively short lived yes love longer than humans… some trees count in centuries — Dave Moore (@DJPMoore) November 9, 2016

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching Try cutting one of your appendages off and see if it regrowth like a plant can.

— Edith L. Hardcastle (@elhardcast) November 9, 2016

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching some genetic individuals (plants) might live forever — Dave Moore (@DJPMoore) November 9, 2016

Much of the rest of the ecosystem relies on them…

@JoseSci @DJPMoore Plants can live without us, but we can’t live without them. Animals are just parasites on a biosphere fueled by plants.

— Tom Buckley (@TomBuckleyLab) November 10, 2016

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching if animals died out many plants would survive…if plants died out most animals would die also — Dave Moore (@DJPMoore) November 9, 2016

… and of course, they give us much of what we need to survive…

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching bread, beer, wine, oxygen…

— Matthew Gilliham (@IonPlants) November 10, 2016

@MMLewandowski52 @PlantTeaching @JoseSci literally food out of (thin) air…especially in aeroponic systems — Krishna Udaiwal (@Plant_Learner) November 10, 2016

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching Plants do everything we do + capture sun E + synthesize virtually all useful medicines and poisons + are beautiful

— Paul Twigg (@UNKBiol106) November 9, 2016

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching Kinda hard to breathe without ’em, for one! — Dan Lin (@DLinYZ) November 10, 2016

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching Well, they make colours, flavours, fragrances, drugs…

— Anne Osbourn (@AnneOsbourn1) November 10, 2016

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching we depend on plants for just about everything, plants are _not_ boring! — McPanos (@panagopucakes) November 18, 2016

We need to highlight how amazing plants are, to counteract “plant blindness”:

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching read this amazing article about #plantblindness by @fossilplants https://t.co/xYWS0MATGM — Lyza Maron (@LyzaMaron) November 10, 2016

@JoseSci @Botanical_ @PlantTeaching plants are all around, always. We watch them seldom. The beauty of the unseen — SEB (@SEBriologia) November 9, 2016

Plant blindness means that many people are unaware of the amazing things that are happening around them:

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching 1) only boring on a minute-by-minute timescale – sped-up timelapses reveal remarkable behaviour (eg phototropism) — Daniel Seaton (@DanielDSeaton) November 11, 2016

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching plants are more just more veiled about how cool they are…like the quiet kid w/ some WILD tricks up their sleeve

— Beth Ansaldi (@AWomaninSTEM) November 9, 2016

Being scientists, a lot of people liked how easy plants are to work with!

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching Plants stay in one place, so I can sample them easily. I love them for that! — A.C. Papageorgiou (@ACPapageorgiou) November 10, 2016

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching It is not as much paperwork when you want to dissects plants! And their stem cells make Sequoia trees live (almost) forever ! — Marie Pireyre (@MapiMry) November 10, 2016

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching They stand still while I measure them! — Vigdis Vandvik (@VVandvik) November 10, 2016

Some of the biggest scientific discoveries were made in plants:

@JoseSci @PlantTeaching the big discoveries. Mendel & the pea; Hook & first cell; McClintock & transposable elements; PTGS in petunia

— Peter Etchells (@peter_etchells) November 9, 2016

In conclusion:

.@JoseSci @JohnInnesCentre @PlantTeaching

Plants are awesome!

— Molecular Plant Path (@MPPjournal) November 11, 2016

Thanks to everyone who took part in this twitter chat! This is just a subset of the huge number of comments we received. To read them all, click here!

Have we missed anything? Why do you love plants?

Dec 16

How to create a successful crop research partnership: the Generation Challenge Programme

By Isabel | Blog, GPC Community, Scientific Meetings

The Generation Challenge Programme (GCP – not to be confused with GPC!) was enthused about repeatedly during the three day GPC/SEB Stress Resilience Forum held in Iguassu Falls, Brazil. This 10-year program was created by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in 2003 as a collaborative approach to developing food crops with improved stress resilience, and is widely hailed as a very successful example of the benefits of international collaboration and practical targeted research funding.

Dr Jean-Marcel Ribault, director of the GCP, spoke at the meeting about the success of the $170 M program, and the key things that other projects should consider when designing collaborative partnerships.

Research initiatives

During its second phase (2009–2014), the GCP focused on seven key research initiatives: improving cassava, rice and sorghum for Africa’s drought-prone environments; improving drought tolerance in maize and wheat for Asia; tackling tropical legume productivity in marginal land in Africa and Asia; and the use of comparative genomics to improve cereal yields in high aluminum and low phosphorus soils.

The GCP acted as an international umbrella organization, distributing grants to fund research across different types of organizations (CG centers, universities and National Programs), either as commissioned projects or competitive funding calls. The aim was to bridge the gap between upstream research and applied crop science, enabling the development of markers and tools that could be of direct benefit to breeders and farmers in developing nations.

Ribault described one of the success stories of the GCP that highlighted the power of international collaborations working together on a problem to benefit people around the world. A team at Cornell University, working alongside Brazilian scientists, won a competitive grant to investigate aluminum (Al) tolerance in sorghum. They discovered a major gene responsible for Al tolerance by growing different accessions of sorghum in hydroponic systems, and began to breed tolerance into Brazilian sorghum cultivars through a commissioned project. The Brazilian team, with the support of scientists from Cornell, took on leadership to transfer these Al tolerant alleles to Africa, where they were also used to improve germplasm for Kenya and Niger.

An ongoing legacy of knowledge

The research funded by the GCP yielded many major research outputs, including a huge variety of genetic and genomic resources, improved germplasm and new bioinformatic tools to aid data management, diversity studies and breeding.

One of the most important parts of the GCP program was its support service component, a key part of which was the development of the Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP), an amazing resource for crop breeders. The IBP was designed as a way to disseminate knowledge and technology, giving breeders in developing countries access to the latest modern plant breeding tools and services in a practical manner.

The IBP’s core product, the Breeding Management System (BMS), allows breeders to manage their breeding program, including lists of crop genetic stocks as well as pedigree and germplasm information and field designs. It provides functionality for electronic phenotypic data capture and statistical analysis, access to molecular markers, breeding design and decision-support tools, and more. Through the Platform, users can also access climate data, geographic information system (GIS) information, genotyping services at concessionary prices, training opportunities and other relevant breeding support services.

A legacy of the GCP, the IBP lives on for further development and deployment, thanks to a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (phase II, 2014–2019). Ribault hinted that dissemination of the platform will be more difficult than its development; indeed it can be challenging to change a person’s behavior and work practices, even if breeders see the benefits of using the IBP!

The keys to success

Throughout his talk, Ribault described how the partnerships formed by and within the GCP were an important foundation to the success of the program. These dynamic networks were based on trust and on an evolution of responsibilities, and many of the partners have continued to work together after the GCP ended in 2014.

Working on projects around the world was not always easy, Ribault explained, but it meant that the results arising from the research were directly relevant to the agricultural practices in those countries, and therefore more likely to be used.

Photo credit: IB-MYC Students – Ramzi Belkhodja/IAMZ

One of the most innovative approaches of the GCP was to dedicate around 15–20% of its budget each year to capacity development, which included holding workshops and training sessions, as well as funding studentships and fellowships to ensure future sustainability of the research projects. One novel practice was to run multi-year breeding courses, where participants were expected to bring along the outputs of their research each year. Anti-bottleneck funding was used to alleviate the problems that people were facing by providing much-needed resources or access to technology; Ribault highlighted this as one of the most important drivers of GCP’s success.

——

If you’d like to read more about the Generation Challenge Programme, please visit the GCP website.

If you’d like to read more about the Integrated Breeding Platform, please visit the IBP website.

Dec 04

GPC/SEB Stress Resilience Symposium: online tools for stress resilience research

By Isabel | Blog, GPC Community, Scientific Meetings

Lisa Martin reports on the GPC’s recent Stress Resilience Symposium and Discussion Forum in Brazil, and highlights some of the brilliant online tools that are available to scientists working in this area.

It’s a strange thing to be packing for 38ºC weather while the temperature at home in England steadily plummets towards 0ºC. Nevertheless, leaving a cold and rainy London behind, Team GPC took to the skies on 21^st October and touched down in tropical Foz do Iguaçu, a resort town on the Brazil/Argentina/Paraguay border.

Iguaçu is best known for its spectacular UNESCO World Heritage waterfalls, but we – that is myself, Executive Director Ruth Bastow, and our two New Media Fellows Amelia and Sarah – were in town for three different reasons. As well as attending the International Plant Molecular Biology conference, followed by the GPC’s Annual General Meeting, we were also running a Stress Resilience Symposium in collaboration with the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB), on 23^rd and 24^th October.

The intention of this Symposium was to bring together experts from around the world to discuss current research efforts in developing plant stress resilience, to showcase new approaches and technologies, and build new networks and collaborations. Our goal is to help contribute to global efforts to develop crops and cropping systems that are better able to deal with fluctuating and stressful environmental conditions.

Food Security Challenges

After a welcome from the new GPC President Professor Bill Davies (Lancaster University, UK), the Symposium got started with a session focused on how scientists are helping to overcome existing and emerging barriers to food security.

Speakers included Matthew Reynolds, who gave an overview of the crops and climate change research at CIMMYT in Mexico; Lancaster’s Martin Parry, who described his group’s work to translate findings in Arabidopsis to capture more carbon and improve the water and nutrient use efficiency of crops; and Bob Sharp from the University of Missouri (USA), who spoke about trying to understand root responses to drought.

As well as hearing from Matthew Gilliham (University of Adelaide, Australia), and Sarah Harvey (University of Warwick, UK), Jean-Marcel Ribault from CGIAR in Mexico described the collaborative approach to developing food crops, with stress resilience in mind, being taken by partners involved in the Generation Challenge Program (GCP, not to be confused with GPC!).

The ultimate aim of this program, Jean-Marcel said, is to improve the germplasm in farmers’ fields, focusing on research on six staple crops, the integration of data management, and building capacity for the future.

To help with the ‘integration of data management’ arm of the project, the GCP consortium has developed the Integrated Breeding Platform (IBP). As well as providing access to many different germplasm resources and diagnostic markers, central to the IBP’s offering is the Breeding Management System, “a suite of interconnected software specifically designed to help breeders manage their day-to-day activities through all phases of their breeding programs. From straightforward phenotyping to complex genotyping, it provides all the tools you need to conduct modern breeding in one comprehensive package”.

iplant_logo The IBP is hosted on the cyberinfrastructure provided by the iPlant Collaborative, which, in case you’ve never heard of it, provides free and open access not only to high performance computing power via virtual machines, but also to a huge range of user-friendly, largely user-generated software for biological data analysis. Quick plug: you can find out more about it by reading this JXB paper I wrote with my former colleagues at the UK Arabidopsis research network GARNet…:-)

Improving stress tolerance in variable environments

The session after lunch took a closer look at some specific stress-related challenges. Drought tolerance was a popular topic, with Andrew Borrell of the University of Queensland (Australia), Vincent Vadez from ICRISAT, and INRA’s François Tardieu all presenting work in this area. Scott Chapman also provided some insights into the modeling work going on at Australia’s CSIRO, which is helping crop breeders to decide which traits to focus on to adapt to different sources of stress. He mentioned QuGene, a tool available via the Integrated Breeding Platform, which is simulation software to investigate the characteristics of genetic material undergoing repeated cycles of selection and molecular marking.

In presenting her work on understanding aluminium toxicity and tolerance in rice, Lyza Maron from Cornell University (USA) introduced us to the Rice Diversity Project, a collaborative effort to explore the genetic basis of variation in rice and its wild ancestors. The Rice Diversity Project website (www.ricediversity.org) hosts a large number of freely available data sets for different rice lines, and a number of tools developed during the project are also made freely available, including a genome browser, a genome subpopulation browser, a seed photo library viewer, and other pieces of analysis software that you can download.

Innovating for Stress Resilience

In the next session, we heard about some exciting projects being carried out across the globe that are advancing our understanding of stress resilience in plants. Chile’s Ariel Orellana gave a fascinating talk about mining the genome of Cystanthe longiscapa, a flowering plant native to the extremely barren and dry Atacama desert; Elizabete Carmo Silva from Lancaster University talked about high-throughput phenotyping in the field, China’s Xinguang Zhu demonstrated some quite stunning 3D models simulating cell structures, water and metabolite movement in the leaf; and potato root architecture was the theme of the presentation made by Awais Khan from the International Potato Center in Peru.

Speaking about the part her lab played in the PRESTA project, Warwick’s Katherine Denby showed us some of the complex, intricate transcriptional network models used to predict, test and reveal interactions between genes involved in Arabidopsis’ defence against Botrytis cinerea. Source code for the WIGWAMS tool, which was specially created to help analyse multiple gene expression time series data, is available here.

Short poster talks

At the end of a fascinating day of fantastic science, we heard some short talks from up and coming researchers whose posters had been selected for an oral presentation: make sure to look up the awesome work of rising stars Elizabeth Neilson from the University of Copenhagen, Nicolas Franck from Universidad de Chile, Cristina Barrero-Sicilia from Rothamsted, and our very own Amelia Frizell-Armitage from the John Innes Centre!

Day 2 – the discussion forum

But the Stress Resilience Symposium didn’t end there… The next day a smaller group of invited experts returned to the meeting venue for some in depth discussion and debate. The aim of the day was to prepare the ground for a forthcoming GPC report, which will highlight the specific challenges facing plant science in terms of developing stress resilient crops and cropping systems, and outline some potential solutions that the plant science community – and those beyond it – can initiate to meet these challenges.

After hearing some presentations about successful large-scale, international projects such as DROPS, IDuWUE, IWYP and others, attendees split off into breakout groups to discuss what they felt to be the key challenges facing stress resilience research today, and the areas in which plant scientists around the world need to come together to mitigate these challenges. Unsurprisingly, this session was lively and animated, with several differences of opinion, but each thought was a valuable and useful contribution to the assessment of the global landscape. Participants talked about the current regulatory climate, particularly surrounding GM and gene edited crops; the need for silos of knowledge to be linked and shared, and for effective technology transfer to make sure that the science we do in the lab has impact in the field – and in the fields where that science is most needed.

After a long but fruitful two days of great science, effective knowledge and ideas sharing, the Stress Resilience Symposium ended with a team photo and further opportunities for “networking” by the hotel pool (or for the Australian participants among us, the Argentina vs. Australia Rugby World Cup Semi Final!). The GPC is now compiling an official report, based on the discussions at the meeting, which we hope will provide a powerful and realistic call to action for stress resilience scientists across the globe to come together. Watch this space!

Thanks to Oliver Kingham and Paul Hutchinson from the SEB, Professors Vicky Buchanan-Wollaston and Jim Beynon from the University of Warwick, Professor Bill Davies from Lancaster University and Andrew Borrell from the University of Queensland for their help in making this symposium possible.

Nov 25

The Global Plant Council Guide To Social Media

By Isabel | ASPB, Blog, Future Directions, GPC Community, Plantae, SEB

Here at the GPC we love social media. It provides a fantastic platform upon which we can spread awareness about our organisation and the work we do. Since Lisa Martin’s appointment as Outreach and Communications Manager in February of this year, and the New Media Fellows two months later, we have expanded our online presence and are reaching more people than ever before. We still have a way to go, but here are a few things we’ve learnt over the past year that might provide you with a bit more social media know-how.

Tweet, tweet, and tweet some more

To increase your following as an individual try to produce maybe one or two good tweets everyday. If you’re tweeting on behalf of an organization and have more time or people power, 5–8 tweets a day should be your target.

The Global Plant Council twitter account now has over 1500 followers. Find us @GlobalPlantGPC

Our Twitter following has grown rapidly over the past year. We had 294 followers on Twitter in September 2014 and now have over 1500! Much of this has been down to there now being four of us maintaining the account rather than Ruth Bastow (@PlantScience) on her own.

The more you tweet, and the better you tweet, the more followers you will get. Things move fast in the Twittersphere, so just a few days of inactivity can mean you drop off the radar.

For more hints about using Twitter see this great article from Mary Williams (@PlantTeaching): Conference Tweeting for Plant Scientists Part 1 and Part 2.

If your followers won’t come to you, go to your followers

Decide on who you want to connect with, find out which social media platform they se most, and set yourself up!

As a global organization we want to connect with all our members and plant scientists around the world, so we need to use different means of communication to do this. In April 2015 we set up a Spanish language Twitter account with Juan Diego Santillana Ortiz (@yjdso), an Ecuadorian-born PhD student at Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf, Germany, who translates our tweets into Spanish.

Of course Twitter is not universally popular, and our main following seems to come from the

The newest edition to the GPC social media family is our GPC Scoop.It account which you can find here

UK and US. To connect with those choosing to use different communication platforms, New Media Fellow Sarah Jose set up a GPC Scoop.It account in September 2015. Around this time we also set up a GPC Facebook page after many of our member organizations told us this was their primary means of connecting with their communities. Although relatively new, this page is slowly gaining momentum and we hope it will provide a great outlet for conversation in the future. Find out about which of our member organizations are on Facebook here.

If there’s a site you use to stay up to date with science content that we don’t have a presence on, do let us know and we will look into setting up an account!

Generate your own content

Ultimately, the best way to expand your reach online is to generate your own content.

The GPC blog was started in October 2014, and in its first 14 months of life received an average of 142 views per month. However, since Lisa, myself and Sarah started working with the GPC, we have been generating one blog post every week, with the result of our monthly views shooting up to almost 700 views per month since May.

This just shows that generating interesting and regular content really does work in terms of increasing reach and online presence. All these blog posts have also contributed towards a growing following on our various social media sites over the past six months.

If you want to write for us, please send us an email or get in touch on Twitter! We are always looking for contributions from the plant science community. Perhaps you’ve recently attended a scientific meeting, are doing a really cool piece of research, organized a great outreach activity or have seen something relevant in the news. Whatever it is, we want to know.

We’re also happy to write about the GPC for your blog or website, so if you would like us to contribute an article, please get in touch!

Cover as many platforms as possible

Try to have a global presence across as many platforms as you think you can maintain, although an inactive account on any social media site won’t do you any favors, so don’t take on too much!

I’ve already described our presence on Twitter, Facebook, Scoop.It and the blog, all of which help make our organization accessible, however people want to use social media.

In addition to this we of course have the GPC website, and Lisa sends out a monthly e-Bulletin providing a summary of all the information published on the website for that month. Anyone can sign up here to stay up to date with our activities, and it’s free!

In a bid to further reach out to members that perhaps don’t engage with social media (yet!), Lisa wrote this article explaining what the GPC does and sent it out to be published by our various member organizations.

Plantae

New Media Fellow Sarah Jose promotes our new Plantae platform at IPMB 2015

Confession time, this isn’t really a helpful hint on how to use social media, but Plantae is so good it deserves a section all on its own!

We are hoping Plantae, set up by the GPC in collaboration with the ASPB, and with support from the SEB, will be the digital ecosystem for the plant science community. It will provide a platform for plant scientists to collaborate with one another, network, and access journals, advice and jobs. You can read more about Plantae on our blog, here.

It’s now in beta testing and you can sign up to give it a go at http://www.plantae.org. Let us know what you think!

Nov 19

GPC AGM: Another exciting year of innovative collaborations

By Isabel | ASPB, Blog, GPC Community, Plantae

The content of the Global Plant Council’s Annual General Meeting was summed up by outgoing Chair Professor Wilhelm Gruissem’s opening remarks: “We have made a lot of progress and accomplished many things, but we still have much work to do”. With many exciting initiatives in the works, the GPC AGM looked back at a year of success and forward to even greater things to come.

The GPC AGM 2015 attendees

The meeting, held in Iguassu Falls, Brazil, brought together representatives from many of the 29 member organizations to discuss the progress made on the GPC initiatives in the past year.

Plantae.org

Plantae promo!

The GPC has been working with the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) to create Plantae.org, a digital ecosystem for the plant science community. It will serve as a resource hub and networking platform, with news, information, funding and job opportunities, educational materials and outreach resources all in one place. For more information, read GPC Outreach and Communications Manager Lisa Martin’s post about Plantae here.

If you would like to register to become a beta tester for Plantae and give valuable feedback on the way the system works, sign up at www.plantae.org. Plantae is due for full release in 2016.

Educational resources

We also teamed up with the Gatsby Charitable Foundation’s Plant Science Tool for Research-Engaged Education (TREE), an online teaching tool providing everyone with inspirational educational resources from the research community. Thanks to our international members, the GPC has begun to translate these resources into other languages to make them more accessible to lecturers, teachers and students around the world.

A big thank you to GPC intern Maura Di Martino, Professor Edith Talensik (Argentinean Society of Plant Physiology/Sociedad Argentina de Fisiología Vegetal, SAFV) and Marília de Campos (Portuguese Society of Plant Physiology/Sociedade Portuguesa de Fisiologia Vegetal, SPFV), who translated four free-to-access TREE research lectures into Italian, two into Spanish and two into Portuguese.

We’ve also collaborated with the popular Teaching Tools in Plant Biology, run by the ASPB, to translate materials into Portuguese with the help of Drs Nelson Saibo, Ana Paula Santos and Professor Cândido Pinto Ricardo of the SPFV.

DivSeek

Diversity Seek (DivSeek) is a community-driven, science-based initiative that aims to unlock the potential of crop diversity stored in seed banks around the world. It is jointly facilitated by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the Secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (FAO), the CGIAR consortium, and the GPC.

During 2015, over 50 partners came together to officially launch DivSeek and bring together large-scale genotyping and phenotyping projects, computational and data standards projects. Our aim is to establish DivSeek as a common umbrella to connect and promote interactions between these activities and establish common state-of-the-art techniques for data collection, integration and sharing. This will improve the efficiency of each project by eliminating redundancy and increasing the availability of data to researchers around the world. Read more about the project here.

In connection with the DivSeek initiative, the GPC is conducting a landscaping survey of large-scale genotyping and phenotyping projects linked to crop diversity around the world. If you’re involved in a project of this type, which we might not know about, please get in touch!

Biofortification

Malnutrition is a major global problem that may be tackled in part by the development of crops with improved nutritional value. There are several international projects underway attempting to do just that, and the GPC’s Biofortification initiative was established to act as an advocate for this research, identifying gaps in the current programs and liaising with key stakeholders to ensure major nutritional needs will be met by a coordinated approach.

Last year’s GPC Biofortification Forum meeting generated a set of 10 recommendations, which has been drafted into a white paper and will be finalized by the end of the year. This document has already drawn attention from a number of stakeholders interested in working with the GPC.

GPC New Media Fellow tells the AGM about the GPC blog!

Stress Resilience

Just a few days before the GPC AGM, we teamed up with the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) to hold a Stress Resilience Forum in Iguassu Falls, Brazil. The event brought together experts from around the world, representing a diverse range of research organizations. The three-day meeting generated a lot of exciting discussion which will be translated into a forthcoming report, establishing GPC as an integrator and facilitator in the field of stress resilience in crops.

Welcoming our new Executive Board

From the 1^st November 2015, we welcomed a new Excutive Board to provide leadership and strategic direction for the GPC:

Chair: Barry Pogson, Australian Society of Plant Scientists

Vice-Chair: Ariel Orellana, Chile’s National Network of Plant Biologists

Treasurer: Vicky Buchanan-Wollaston, Society for Experimental Biology

Board Member: Carl Douglas, Canadian Society of Plant Biologists

Board Member: Yusuke Saijo, Japanese Society of Plant Physiologists

Thanks for a great year!

Thanks to all from the GPC team! From left to right: Ruth Bastow (Executive Director), Amelia Frizell-Armitage (New Media Fellow), Sarah Jose (New Media Fellow) and Lisa Martin (Outreach and Communications Manager).

GPC Community