David Livingston from the USDA Agricultural Research Service made a beautiful video of the construction of an Arabidopsis flower using 248 sections of an Arabidopsis flower that was paraffin-embedded and sectioned at 20 microns. It includes images of the internal structure of the flower. The method he used is published in Livingston et al., 2010.
GARNet’s An Introduction to Opportunities in Plant Synthetic Biology conference couldn’t have come at a better time – it feels like synthetic biology has officially arrived. Over the last week or so, some long-anticipated synbio news was announced. First of all, there are the two synbio funding opportunities from BBSRC and other [...]
This is a guest post from Laura Dixon, post-doc at the John Innes Centre. Monogram, the UK small grains conference, was hosted by the James Hutton Institute in Dundee. The conference, which was attended by scientists, breeders and companies showcased the research projects and technologies recently developed for small grains [...]
This is a guest post by Susie Lydon, Outreach Officer at the University of Nottingham Plant science is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, and for early career researchers, gaining experience in working across the traditional subject boundaries can be very useful. A common problem is that many of the training opportunities in relevant areas [...]
It’s now nearly a month since UK PlantSci 2013, and high time I wrote something about it on this blog. Rebecca Nesbit has written two posts about it already on the Society of Biology blog, and a New Phytologist meeting report will be coming out soon. The Weeding the Gems [...]
Just how many things can we really use Arabidopsis thaliana as a ‘model’ for? Certainly our favourite weed has an historic advantage for genomic research. As the first plant genome to be fully sequenced, it has had a long head start for all sorts of ‘omics databases and projects. The A. thaliana databases have [...]
Michael Pound is an image analyst at CPIB. He kindly agreed to write a guest post for GARNet on his recent project, confocal image analysis software CellSeT. CellSeT, which was recently published in Plant Cell (24:1353), is open source software which analyses confocal images of plant cells. CellSeT can extract information including fluorescence and membrane polarity [...]
Well, what felt like the biggest week of the year for UK plant science is now over. Last week, the UK Plant Phenomics Network meeting, UK PlantSci 2013, and Monogram all happened at the University of Dundee. It was a whirlwind week of inspirational talks, updates, people, and a drop or two of Scottish [...]
After the ELIXIR/GOBLET workshop before Easter, I headed to Nottingham for another workshop, this time as an onlooker. In a brilliantly eccentric set-up there were actually two parallel workshops, and the participants hopped between the two and had lunch, dinner, and tea breaks in the same rooms. The event I [...]
To whet your appetite for next week’s UK PlantSci 2013 conference in Dundee, here are clips of the keynote speakers Charles Godfray (University of Oxford) and David Baulcombe (University of Cambridge). I think that the Godfray clip can be considered a very unofficial ‘preview’ of his keynote lecture Feeding 10 Billion People on a Finite [...]
Large datasets are now the norm in modern biology. Modelling is progressing from the protein and molecular interaction level to tissue, organ, and whole-plant scales; while everything from genomics through to phenomics and, increasingly, field-level and multi-scale biology involves high throughput experiments. All of these necessitate ever greater computing power [...]
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