Happenings

An international collaboration lead by Plant Biologist Ray Ming has yielded a 90% draft sequence of the first transgenic crop genome, virus-resistant papaya. This important work was featured on the cover of the journal NATURE. Papaya joins Arabidopsis, poplar, grape and rice as the only higher plant species with sequenced genomes. Ming et al.'s work will now propel comparative genomic studies of evolutionary relationships, functional organization, and differential gene content, among others. Plant Biologist Mary Schuler, grad students Andrea Gschwend and Yingjun Li, technician Jan Murray, and postdocs Jianping Wang, Cuixia Chen and Jong-Kuk Na co-authored the paper. See the local story here.

CONGRATULATIONS to Plant Biology Graduate Student Charles Chen on his Ph.D. and successful defense of his thesis entitled ""Heterogeneity of leaf-level photosynthesis as seen through the lens of ozone, soybean, and chlorophyll fluorescence imaging" under Stephen Long.

CONGRATULATIONS to Plant Biology grad student Ryan Kelly for winning a 2008-2009 NSF Graduate Teaching Fellowship in K-12 Education (GK-12). Under such auspices, Ryan will be taking his holocene climate modeling skills to the masses, these being Illinois secondary school classes and their teachers.

"What we discovered was startling," says Plant Biology head Evan DeLucia, about the alarmingly compromised defenses against insect predation of plants grown under elevated carbon dioxide at SoyFACE. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and authored by postdoc Jorge Zavala, grad student Clare Casteel, Evan and May Berenbaum, has received worldwide attention since being picked up by United Press International.

Plant Biologist Lisa Ainsworth says "Things are going to get worse". (ouch!)  No, not everything, but Lisa's meta-analysis of rising carbon dioxide and ozone impacts on rice farming suggests tropical rice yields may take a double-digit hit if global warming and ozone generation are not curtailed. Lisa's warning of a threat to such a major world food source was highlighted in a feature appearing in the March 24 issue of New Scientist and later picked up by Reuters.

“We need to think much more broadly” says Plant Biologist Stephen Long, regarding the use of corn and corn-growing land as a source of feedstock for biofuels.  Steve’s views on alternative plants for biofuels, such as Miscanthus, were featured in a news story entitled “Energy: Not your father's biofuels” appearing in the Feburary 21 issue of the international science newsweekly, Nature.

Browse our Scrapbook for past Happenings.