News by Subject Biology

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) - Australia's national biodiversity database - uses cutting-edge digital tools to let people share, access and analyse data about local plants, animals and fungi, as well as environmental data like rainfall and temperature. All data are publicly available - ALA was established on open-access and open-source principles. A new forum paper published in the open-access, peer-reviewed Biodiversity Data Journal details ALA's background, current state and future directions.

The conversion of light into chemical energy by plants and photosynthetic microorganisms is one of the most important processes in nature, removing climate-damaging CO2 from the atmosphere. Protein complexes, so-called photosystems, play the key role in this process. An international research team shed light for the first time on the structure and function of a transition state in the synthesis of photosystem II.

Grass crops are able to bend the rules of evolution by borrowing genes from their neighbours, giving them a competitive advantage, a new study has revealed.

"Our work adds to a growing body of literature that demonstrates the sustainability of current methods of disease control used by apple growers," said Wallis. While previous research investigated this question by looking at just the soil or microbes living on the plant surface, this is the first study to look at the impact of streptomycin on the endophytic leaf microbiomes, which are likely attributing more to host health than the surface microbes.

Researchers at GMI - Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences - and the John Innes Centre, Norwich, United Kingdom, determine that gene-regulatory mechanisms at an early embryonic stage govern the flowering behavior of Arabidopsis later in development. The paper is published in the journal PNAS.

In a new study published in the Phytobiomes Journal, "Influence of plant host and organ, management strategy, and spore traits on microbiome composition," Dr. Frances Trail and her research group are interested in three factors that might attribute to microbial assemblage: the age of the plant, the organ or tissue type, and the management strategy. They followed a 3-year crop rotation that included corn, wheat, and soybean planted in a single field.

For more sustainability on a global level, EU legislation should be changed to allow the use of gene editing in organic farming. This is what an international research team involving the Universities of Bayreuth and Göttingen demands in a paper published in the journal "Trends in Plant Science".