The many advantages of chloroplasts
Chloroplasts are a major advantage to doing synthetic biology in plants. They produce starch and some amino acids as well as hosting photosynthesis, all fully separated from other cellular functions...
View ArticleTesting heat tolerance in the field
Global climate change and localised human impact, such as waste disposal or fertilizer use, has and will continue to have an effect on the world’s flora, both natural and agricultural. Predicting this...
View ArticlePotato Potato
North American potato varieties The potato, brought across the Atlantic by explorers like Christopher Columbus and Francis Drake during the 15th and 16th Centuries, changed Europe forever. During the...
View ArticleBioinformatics: Training the Trainers
My apologies for the GARNet radio silence over the last couple of weeks – we’ve been busy helping with PlantSci 2013 preparations as well as working on our own 2013 meetings (announcement of our...
View ArticleBioinformatics: Training the Trainers
My apologies for the GARNet radio silence over the last couple of weeks – we’ve been busy helping with PlantSci 2013 preparations as well as working on our own 2013 meetings (announcement of our...
View ArticleBioinformatics and Data Analysis Training for Plant Scientists
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...
View ArticleReady for UK PlantSci 2013
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)....
View ArticleMathematics in the Plant Sciences
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...
View ArticleDundee’s week of plant science conferences
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...
View ArticleCellSet confocal image analysis
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...
View ArticleA model tree?
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...
View ArticleCelebrating basic plant science with David Baulcombe
Barbara McClintock discovered transposable elements when investigating irregular colouring in maize. It’s now nearly a month since UK PlantSci 2013, and high time I wrote something about it on this...
View ArticleSynthetic biology has arrived
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,...
View ArticlePlant synthetic biology round-up
Well, I’ve just about recovered from this week’s GARNet meeting, An Introduction to Opportunities in Plant Synthetic Biology. It was a great two days. For a report of the meeting through the medium of...
View ArticleOpen access: How much is enough?
Nearly everyone is behind Open Access as an idea, but when RCUK demanded that all papers published from RCUK-funded groups be published open access it became clear that widespread, truly open access...
View ArticleTwo GARNet Events
Image by Centimedia.org for GARNet We have some GARNet news to share! First of all, we are pleased to finally open registration for the hands-on iPlant training workshop ‘Data Mining with iPlant‘....
View ArticleWhat isn’t plant science?
Carboxymethylated nanocellulose adsorbed on a silica surface. When does plant science stop being plant science? Here at Warwick, the Warwick Manufacturing Group made a nano-cellulose steering wheel...
View ArticleBiology by design
At the moment I’m reading a lot about synthetic biology (GARNet report and paper to come in the next few months) and it’s all technical stuff – genome assembly, online resources, transformation...
View ArticlePerseverance and community: The opening session of Plant Biology 2013
Follow Plant Biology 2013 on #plantbiology2013 Plant Biology 2013 is in full flow here in Providence, Rhode Island. It kicked off on Saturday afternoon with an impressive Awards Ceremony recognising...
View ArticleFrom Plant Biology 2013
Last week I was at ASPB’s annual conference, Plant Biology 2013. It was a great week and I learned a lot of new science and discovered a lot of new resources to share with UK plant scientists – some...
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