Plant Sciences

Terrific - Gina Kolata, science writer for the New York Times, looks at the new paper by Michael Palmgren's group out in Trends in Plant Science. They propose a new term, Rewilding, for introducing ancestral genes into today's crop to increase their resiliance to stress. Several other esteemed plant scientists are quoted in this very good story too.

The TIPS article is here: "Feasibility of new breeding techniques for organic farming"  http://www.cell.com/trends/plant-science/abstract/S1360-1385(15)00112-0

We've all heard this paradoxical claim: If we want tangible, scientific solutions to society's urgent problems, then we need to invest in basic, curiosity-driven research that’s not motivated by its potential for practical applications. As Vannevar Bush, director of the United States government's chief science agency during World War II famously put it: "Basic research is scientific capital." By investing in basic research— research that is "performed without thought of practical ends"—we create "the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn."

It's easy to pay lip service to this idea, but harder to put it into practice, especially when we have to choose how to spend a limited budget. Basic research can seem terribly inefficient. Its practical results are hard to predict, and they often have little to do with the original research goals. Vannevar Bush argued that the best way to support basic research is to give federal funding to academic scientists, who are not under pressure to produce immediately practical results and are “free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead." But this approach is often hard for many to accept because scientists sometimes undertake what seem like wasteful projects with no practical benefits. This leads to accusations that scientists are making poor decisions—in a recent op-ed written with Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chair of the House Science Committee, complained that, "The academic community forgets that federal science funding should be in the national interest."

This paper summary is contributed by Dr. Clint Springer @clintspringer (http://www.sju.edu/about-sju/faculty-staff/faculty-experts/clint-springer-phd).

Scott Poethig’s group at the University of Pennsylvania has created an excellent new tool for use in genetic analysis studies of Arabidopsis thaliana. Using the “traffic lines” they have created, one can use a pair of seed-expressed green and red fluorescent transgenes that flank the mutation of interest to identify the genotype of mutants without the need for phenotypic analysis. This powerful tool cuts mutant analysis time substantially in all mutant genotypes and provides a way of determining genotype if a visible phenotype is not present. Because of the coverage of the “traffic line” insertions across the genome, one could make use of this resource in classroom studies of plant genetics to examine segregating populations as well mutant analysis. The “traffic lines” are available in both the Columbia and Landsberg erecta genetic backgrounds and can be ordered from the The Arabidopsis Information Resource center.

http://www.genetics.org/content/200/1/35.abstract