May 15 2014 Communicating with the world across the border By Carnegie HQ Audio Stanford, CA —All living cells are held together by membranes, which provide a barrier to the transport of nutrients. They are also the communication platform connecting the outside world to the cell’s interior control centers. Thousands of ...
May 01 2014 Decoding the chemical vocabulary of plants By Carnegie HQ Audio Stanford, CA —Plants spend their entire lifetime rooted to one spot. When faced with a bad situation, such as a swarm of hungry herbivores or a viral outbreak, they have no option to flee but instead must fight to survive. What is the key to ...
Apr 15 2014 New technique will accelerate genetic characterization of photosynthesis By Carnegie HQ Audio Stanford, CA — Photosynthesis provides fixed carbon and energy for nearly all life on Earth, yet many aspects of this fascinating process remain mysterious. For example, little is known about how it is regulated in response to changes in light ...
Apr 15 2014 Drought hormones measured By Carnegie HQ Audio Stanford, CA—Floods and droughts are increasingly in the news, and climate experts say their frequency will only go up in the future. As such, it is crucial for scientists to learn more about how these extreme events affect plants in order to ...
Mar 16 2014 Nectar: A sweet reward from plants to attract pollinators By Carnegie HQ Audio Stanford, CA — Evolution is based on diversity, and sexual reproduction is key to creating a diverse population that secures competitiveness in nature. Plants had to solve a problem: they needed to find ways to spread their genetic material. ...
Feb 18 2014 Nitrogen-tracking tools for better crops and less pollution By Carnegie HQ Audio Stanford, CA — As every gardner knows, nitrogen is crucial for a plant’s growth. But nitrogen absorption is inefficient. This means that on the scale of food crops, adding significant levels of nitrogen to the soil through fertilizer presents ...
Feb 03 2014 Carnegie’s Chen recognized for contributions to plant science By Carnegie HQ Stanford, CA —Carnegie’s Li-Quing Chen, recipient of a Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science, announced late last year, is honored with an editorial and minireview in New Phytologist this month. The journal’s Tansley medal is awarded each ...
Nov 07 2013 Plant cell architecture: Growth toward a light source By Carnegie HQ Audio Stanford, CA —Inside every plant cell, a cytoskeleton provides an interior scaffolding to direct construction of the cell’s walls, and thus the growth of the organism as a whole. Environmental and hormonal signals that modulate cell growth ...
Sep 10 2013 Carnegie’s Rubén Rellán-Álvarez Receives Young Scientist Award By Carnegie HQ Washington, D.C.— Postdoctoral fellow, Rubén Rellán-Álvarez at the Department of Plant Biology has been awarded the prestigious Marschner Young Scientist Award by the International Plant Nutrition Colloquium. The award was established for “ ...
Sep 05 2013 Clues in Coral Bleaching Mystery By Carnegie HQ Stanford, CA — Coral reefs are tremendously important for ocean biodiversity, as well as for the economic and aesthetic value they provide to their surrounding communities. Unfortunately they have been in great decline in recent years, much of it ...