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twitter Archives - The Global Plant Council

Apr 07
0

Twitter for Science Networking

By | Blog, ECRi, Science communication

A common stereotype of Twitter is that it’s trivial and ephemeral. It’s certainly ephemeral, but it doesn’t have to be trivial if you’re interested in science. If you have a focus on a particular topic, Twitter is an opportunity to get regular updates on news, papers and opportunities like jobs on a rapid basis.

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May 22
0

Round-up of Fascination of Plants Day 2016

By | Blog, GPC Community

On May 18th, botany geeks around the world shared their love of plants in this year’s Fascination of Plants Day! Here’s our round-up of some of the best #fopd tweets!

First things first, test your skills with this challenging plant science quiz:

Check out some of the amazing work done by Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI):

Have you read this thought-provoking post from The Guardian?

Check out these amazing ears of maize! 

Read on to learn how signals are converted to epigenetic memory:

More from BGCI:

Includes the amazing subheading “Ovules before brovules”!:

Great to hear from some of our younger plant scientists:

Some fun facts to share with your friends:

A fantastic image featuring the adaptations of marram grass to its sand-dune home:

This fascinating mutation results from an elongated apical meristem:

How long does this starch need to last? Plants use their internal circadian clock to ration their energy stores:

The loblolly pine’s genome is over seven times larger than yours!

Need more Fascinating Plants? There are lots of great ‘Roots and Shoots’ articles on eLife‘s Medium page! 

How did you celebrate Fascination of Plants Day this year? Let us know in the comments below!

Apr 22
0

Witty gene names

By | Blog, GPC Community

It is a well known fact that biologists are a clever bunch. Most of the time they’re out applying their intellect and tackling the world’s problems, but occasionally (probably at happy hour on a Friday evening) they sit around coming up with witty names for genes.

Drosophila (fruit fly) geneticists have some classics, including the tinman mutant (which lacks a heart), Smaug (represses the ‘dwarves’ – Nanos), and the tribbles mutant (which has out of control cell division – don’t add water!).

Don’t worry though – plant scientists have come up with some clever gene names of their own! I asked the #plantsci community on Twitter for their favorites:

The superman mutant in Arabidopsis lacks the female parts of the flower, replacing it with more stamens. Fairly funny on its own, but naming its suppressor KRYPTONITE was even better!   

Like the 1970s TV cop Kojak, the kojak mutant is completely (root) hairless! In contrast, the werewolf  mutant produces LOTS of root hairs.

kojak

The kojak mutant (B) is completely bald! Image credit: Favery et al., 2001 and Universal Television

 

Ah yes, we can partially blame GPC’s Ruth Bastow for this one as she was co-first author on the discovery paper! TIMING OF CAB EXPRESSION1 (TOC1) had been shown to be involved in the circadian clock, and when Ruth and her colleagues discovered a gene that appeared to regulate TOC1, they named it TIC for the clever TIC-TOC of the circadian clock, then fit the full name (TIME FOR COFFEE) around it! The official reason was, “We located TIC function to the mid to late subjective night, a phase at which any human activity often requires coffee”. Hmm!    

My thesis is on stomatal development, so these are close to my heart! The word ‘stoma’ is  ancient Greek for ‘mouth’, so lots of stomata genes are mouth-based puns!

Where does YODA fit into this, you ask? This gene is the (Jedi) master regulator of stomatal development, of course!

tmm

The too many mouths mutant produces too many stomata. Image credit: Guseman et al., 2010.

 

In the run-up to the Brexit referendum on the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, SCHENGEN is a topical choice! This gene is involved in establishing the Casparian Strip, a lignified type of cell wall located in the endodermis. The schengen mutants don’t form this barrier, so were named after the Schengen Agreement that ‘established a borderless area between European member states’.  

Lisa’s spot on with these. The pennywise mutation was discovered first, named after a band, then when a paralogous gene was identified by the same authors, they continued the finance theme with POUND-FOOLISH.

The armadillo mutant in Drosophila has abnormal segment development, which looks a little like the armor plating of an armadillo. This protein contains ‘Armadillo repeats’, which is actually found in a huge variety of species including plants. The ARABIDILLO genes in Arabidopsis promote lateral root development, while PHYSCODILLO genes affect early development in the moss Physcomitrella patens.

 

Thanks, Ian!

Thanks to everyone who participated in this list. If you have a favorite whimsical gene name that hasn’t been mentioned, let us know in the comment section!

Jan 01
0

Plant scientists respond: “Plants are boring!”

By | 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.)

 

 

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

 

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


They can alter their environments in really interesting ways too:

   

A lot of people are interested in plant reproduction:

 

 Some species can survive for millennia:


Much of the rest of the ecosystem relies on them…


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


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


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


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

Some of the biggest scientific discoveries were made in plants:


In conclusion:

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?

Nov 25
0
applications and tools

The Global Plant Council Guide To Social Media

By | 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.

  1. 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.

Global Plant Council twitter account

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.

  1. 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

Scoopit

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!

  1. 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!

  1. 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.

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

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!

Jun 24
1

An Interview with Mary Williams: Plant Teaching & Social Media

By | ASPB, Blog, GPC Community, Interviews

Mary Williams headshotThis week we spoke to Mary Williams about plant science education, her role as features editor of The Plant Cell, and effective use of social media for scientists.

 

 

 

What inspired you to focus your career on education in the plant sciences? 

As a biochemistry student whose friends were arts majors, I discovered that I really enjoyed the challenge of explaining things through plain language and analogy. After a postdoc I took a faculty position at a primarily undergraduate institution where professors were encouraged to explore different approaches to teaching.

By sharing ideas and resources through ASPB Teaching Tools in Plant Biology, workshops, and my blog, I try to help young scientists gain confidence and become better teachers.

How have people responded to the Teaching Tools in Plant Biology (TTPB) you have developed, and how are these being used?

The response has been really positive. I regularly hear from undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, lab heads and educators who are using them for a multitude of purposes including lesson preparation, self-learning and outreach. The articles can be accessed through most university libraries or via ASPB membership. They are also available throughout the developing world through the AGORA program.

The teaching tools articles are quite technical, so we didn’t anticipate that high school teachers would want to read them. However, in response to their expressed interest I started posting interesting newsclips and videos onto the various social media sites that I manage. This summer we’re moving all of the content onto a new platform, Plantae.org, which will provide a centralized place for educators to connect in what I have described as a Global Plant Science Learning Community. I’m really excited about providing a space for people to share their ideas and promote discussions about effective plant science teaching.

Why do you think teaching the plant sciences in an inspirational way proves so difficult?

The biggest obstacle is the preconception that plants are not interesting, which too often is conveyed by teachers in primary and secondary education. Additionally, many students have no first-hand experience of growing or caring for a plant, and this first-hand experience is really key. We find that many of the most engaged young people have grown up in close contact with plants, perhaps through a family’s involvement in agriculture or horticulture.

In terms of status and salaries, our society places a much higher value on medical sciences and medical research than the plant sciences; the tangible rewards of working with and studying plants are not always evident.

How can we better capture student imaginations when it comes to plants?

Giving students the opportunity to physically engage and inquire about plants is critical, and this has to span from the earliest years through university education. Students need to use all of their senses when exploring plants, and being allowed to explore in an open-ended way lets students develop an interest and curiosity about plants.

This idea of exploration and open-ended inquiry should continue into university, even in large lecture classes. Give students a pea in a pot to take home and observe. Hand out Brussels sprouts, green onions and daisies for students to pull apart and examine. Use some class time to pose open-ended questions. Good ideas are plentiful!

Innovative tools and support for teachers can also be found on sites such as Wisconsin Fast Plants developed by Paul Williams, SAPS and PlantingScience.org.

You are features editor for The Plant Cell. What does this role involve? 

TTPB is published by The Plant Cell, and we made the decision early on to focus our effort on the teaching of upper-level plant biology. This is the point at which students transition from using textbooks to the primary literature.

To write each article, I read dozens of recent papers and review articles to identify the key questions and the foundational concepts a student needs. I then create both a written article and an image-rich version of the information. Images are powerful ways to explain difficult concepts, and also are useful to people who teach and learn in languages other than English. After I finish the articles I send them out to several experts for peer review. I update the articles regularly so that they continue to reflect our current understanding.

A new initiative this year has been to draw on the talents of the community to develop additional Teaching Tools topics. We’ve been running competitions to solicit pre-proposals for development into Teaching Tools – you can read more about that here.

When did you first get involved with social media? How can social media platforms such as blogging and Twitter be of benefit to researchers? 

My social media roots stretch back to the early 1990s when I was active in the usenet email-based Arabidopsis and Plant Education newsgroups. These networks were excellent sources of resources, ideas and support as I became an independent researcher and educator.

I started using Twitter, ScoopIt and Facebook in earnest in 2011 with the encouragement of Sarah Blackford (@BiosciCareers) and the Global Plant Council’s Ruth Bastow (@plantscience). Like many people, I quickly realized the power of Twitter and other social media tools as a way to connect and converse with the broader community of plant scientists, plant educators, and other plant enthusiasts. Social media not only lets me meet and learn from plant scientists from around the world, but also keep abreast of new publications and get a glimpse into what is being discussed at conferences.

Mary identifying moss in the west of Scotland

Mary identifying moss in the west of Scotland

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary’s top tips for getting started on social media:

  1. Apply the same social rules online as you would in real life
  2. Be friendly
  3. Give credit where it’s due
  4. Avoid talking about religion and politics; be culturally sensitive
  5. Listen a lot, talk a little
  6. Don’t be discouraged if it takes a while to get noticed
  7. Be professional; swearing, gossip and slander are common in the social sphere, but when it’s being broadcast to the world and recorded for posterity, think twice
Apr 28
0

The Next Generation

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

Meet Amelia and Sarah, the two newest additions to the Global Plant Council team.

As a coalition of plant and crop societies from the around the globe, the Global Plant Council (GPC) aims to bring together scientists, policy makers and other stakeholders to engage in coordinated strategies to find solutions to global problems.

The GPC currently has 29 member organizations representing thousands of scientists in diverse disciplines around the world. Online media such as this blog and the @GlobalPlantGPC Twitter account provide a fantastic resource for our member organizations to stay in touch, share ideas and develop interdisciplinary collaborations.

For Spanish speakers, we’ve also recently launched a Spanish version of our Twitter feed at @GPC_EnEspanol, kindly translated for us by Juan-Diego Santillana-Ortiz, an Ecuadorian currently studying at Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Amelia is in the third year of her PhD at the John Innes Centre, Norwich UK. She is researching how altering the biochemistry of epicuticular waxes affects the physiology and ultimately yield of UK wheat. She tweets @AmeliaFrizell (https://twitter.com/AmeliaFrizell)

Amelia Frizell-Armitage is in the third year of her PhD at the John Innes Centre, Norwich UK. She is researching how altering the biochemistry of epicuticular waxes affects the physiology and ultimately yield of UK wheat. She tweets @AmeliaFrizell.

To further enhance this network, the GPC has awarded two New Media Fellowships to early career plant scientists Amelia Frizell-Armitage and Sarah Jose. The role of the Fellows will be to increase visibility of the GPC through managing this blog, devising new strategies to promote GPC activities and to increase traffic flow and engagement on Twitter.

A key priority will be to increase members’ contributions to this blog to promote their organizations and associated activities. Contributing to the blog is a fantastic way to interact with other GPC members, and we are always open to suggestions for guest posts. Perhaps you want to talk about a recent meeting or activity, discuss a particularly exciting piece of emerging research, promote a newly published book, or even just give some insight into your everyday life?

Sarah Jose is a third year PhD student at the University of Bristol, UK. She is investigating the link between wax biosynthesis and stomatal development in barley and Arabidopsis, and its potential impact on the water use efficiency of plants. Find her on Twitter @JoseSci.

Sarah Jose is a third year PhD student at the University of Bristol, UK. She is investigating the link between wax biosynthesis and stomatal development in barley and Arabidopsis, and its potential impact on the water use efficiency of plants. Find her on Twitter @JoseSci.

Whatever it is, we want to hear from you! Please get in touch on Twitter, via the comments section on the blog, or by emailing our Outreach & Communications Manager Lisa Martin.

It is an exciting year ahead for the GPC with the launch of a new online platform for the plant community that is being built in partnership with the ASPB and with support from SEB. There are also various fundraising initiatives in the works, and a Stress Resilience Forum coming up in October, which is being organized in collaboration with SEB.

Stay tuned to this blog to keep up to date with all our activities. The events calendar for member organizations is also looking busy and vibrant, and can be found here.