Plants and Pipettes

This week’s episode includes a jump back in time. Crazy, how nature do that. It’s totally not linked to a big mess-up by both of us. No. Really. We are good with this stuff. For real.

Check out our summary post of 2019. It has lots of links to lots of great stories.

We’re really happy about the new paper in Nature Food, where Ratan Chopra’s work (and of his co-workers) on pennycress was just published. We talke about it on the blog here and had an interview with Ratan here.

Paper of the week: Chery, J. G., Pace, M. R., Acevedo-Rodríguez, P., Specht, C. D., & Rothfels, C. J. (2019). Modifications during Early Plant Development Promote the Evolution of Nature’s Most Complex Woods. Current Biology.

Tegan’s favourite plant is Nepenthes aristolochioides/Steve. It looks like this:

And this is the post where we talked about a flower that looks similar to this guy’s flower.

Joram present the life and work of Dame Caroline Dean. Read her interview here.

Tegan presents the Rhyme and Reason bias.

Dr. Frances Arnold retracts a paper and thereby show good scientific error culture. Here is her tweet on the matter:

It is painful to admit, but important to do so. I apologize to all. I was a bit busy when this was submitted, and did not do my job well. https://t.co/gJDU0pzlN8

I set up a tiny hydroponics setup using pipette tips for quick & space-efficient collection of MOUNTAINS of Arabidopsis tissue that we often need for RNAseq and/or ion measurements. Feel free to check out and give feedback.https://t.co/AFpOqh8p0h

A hydroponics system made from tip boxes.

Australian National University returns vials of blood to indigenous people.

The immortal life of Henrietta Sacks

Horizontal gene transfer allowed algae to move from water to soil

Science Vs. episode on Veganism

Parrots are better than people

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

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RAWR XD! This week, we’re all about dinosaurs and old geological time periods. Did you know that both the iconic T-Rex and the velociraptor are dinosaurs from the cretaceous period and not from the jurassic period?

Paper of the week: Pollination of Cretaceous flowers, Tong Bao, Bo Wang, Jianguo Li, David Dilcher, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Dec 2019, 116 (49) 24707-24711; DOI:10.1073/pnas.1916186116

Joram’s favourite plant is Holly. Find out more about it on the advent calendar!

Tegan presents the life and work of Inna A. Dobruskina. You can read more about her here and here. This link reports on the horrifying culture of sexual assault in academia.

Joram presents the survivorship bias where the conclusion is distorted based on the fact that data points are lost before the measurement begins and therefore are unaccounted for.

Terrible moth

Horrific fish

cellPAINT – a tool for illustrating molecular cell biology. See also this link on twitter.

Vegan leather made from cacti (hopefully more than a cool news story)

Deconstructing climate change arguments

CHECK OUT OUR ADVENT CALENDAR!

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

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Rejoice for we returned. Properly. Full episode. Fun facts. 2 cat facts. Christmas came early.

We present two papers this week on the same topic:

Tegan’s paper: Maclean, A. E., Hertle, A. P., Ligas, J., Bock, R., Balk, J., & Meyer, E. H. (2018). Absence of Complex I Is Associated with Diminished Respiratory Chain Function in European Mistletoe. Current Biology, 28(10), 1614-1619.e3.

Joram’s paper: Senkler, J., Rugen, N., Eubel, H., Hegermann, J., & Braun, H.-P. (2018). Absence of Complex I Implicates Rearrangement of the Respiratory Chain in European Mistletoe. Current Biology, 28(10), 1606-1613.e4.

Tegan’s favourite plant is Poinsettia. You can read about it here and here.

Joram presents the life and work of Edith Rebecca Saunders.

Tegan quickly researched the bias of “Women are Wonderful”

The mould that stole Christmas

Salmon in a fMRI

CHECK OUT OUR ADVENT CALENDAR!

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

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We’re still on a podcast break. Good news is that Tegan arrived well in her new home. Bad news is that Joram got himself a weird virus that will knock him out in 10, 9, 8, 7, …

This intermission presents the article we published as our advent calendar on day 3. If you want to read more about Poinsettia, we also have this other article for you.

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

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Good news! Tegan successfully relocated herself and everything she holds dear to a new country. Bad news is, however, that the move still took too much time for us to properly record a real episode. You’ll have to make do with this little intermission, where Joram reads you a story we published in April this year. It’s about a superweed!

Don’t worry, we will be back with our regular episodes in a few weeks. Until then, check out the blog for weekly stories from the world of plant research. 

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

We’re continuing our break from proper episodes for a little longer.

To quench your thirst for plant science, we have another short story from the blog here on the podcast. This time, Tegan wrote about Arabidopsis ecotypes and Joram reads it to you.

Don’t worry, we will be back with our regular episodes in a few weeks. Until then, check out the blog for weekly stories from the world of plant research. 

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

This week, we have bad news. No new episode from your favourite hosts of the Plants and Pipettes Podcast. Tegan went missing in a mountain of moving boxes several days ago, and Joram has a pacifier permanently attached to his face. So instead, we have this little filler for you.

The post we present is “Cats and Naked Ladies” from earlier this year.

Don’t worry, we will be back with our regular episodes in a few weeks. Until then, check out the blog for weekly stories from the world of plant research.

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

Spooky time is over – now it’s all about regular boring plants again. Boring? Not on this podcast! It’s pretty much the most amazing plant podcast on this website.

Joram’s paper: Liu, L., Li, C., Teo, Z. W. N., Zhang, B., & Yu, H. (2019). The MCTP-SNARE Complex Regulates Florigen Transport in Arabidopsis. The Plant Cell, 31(10), 2475–2490.

Tegan’s favourite plant is Taxus brevifolia, the pacific yew.

Joram presents the life and work of Shipra Guha-Mukherjee, an Indian botanist working on on plant tissue culture, plant molecular biology, biotechnology and cell molecular biology. Here is the link to her autobiographic article.

In our new segment we discuss cognitive biases. Tegan brings the first one, and it is the IKEA effect. We place a disproportionally high value on something that we have (partly) created.

Early rice farmers selected for weedy imposters

One thousand plant transcriptomes and the phylogenomics of green plants

Award winner Amanda Leach stepped out of research and managed to come back

The greenhouse gas impacts of converting food production in England and Wales to organic methods

A new CRISPR tool allows unprecedented ways to edit the genome. here is the article on wired and here is the original publication.

Cat fact: bush crickets have the largest testicle to body ratio.

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

This is the spoooooookiest episode of our podcast! We have scary stories, spooky facts and gruesome details about plants and pipettes. We recorded in full costume and would like to see your plant related costumes! Send them to us!

Tegan’s paper: Vaidya, A. S., Helander, J. D. M., Peterson, F. C., Elzinga, D., Dejonghe, W., Kaundal, A., … Cutler, S. R. (2019). Dynamic control of plant water use using designed ABA receptor agonists. Science, 366(6464), eaaw8848. (on researchgate)

Joram’s favourite plant is the spooooooky ghost pipe – it’s part of our scariest plants list.

Tegan presents the life and work of Ben Barres, the first openly transgender member of the National Academy of Science. This is the article about him Tegan mentions.

Pumpkins are really boring.

When laying their eggs, tobacco hawkmoths avoid plants that smell of caterpillar feces

5 Reasons We Enjoy Being Scared

#TeamTrees, this is a good video about it, this is an article claiming that reforestation potential is grossly overestimated.

Scientists Taught Rats to Drive Tiny Cars to Earn Froot Loops

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!

Sometimes, it’s ok to do a short episode. After all, there is plenty to listen to again on here, so yeah. We talk about RuBisCO research and plants and stuff. It really is like the ones before but different and with other topics.

Joram’s paper: Lobo, A. K. M., Orr, D. J., Gutierrez, M. O., Andralojc, P. J., Sparks, C., Parry, M. A. J., & Carmo-Silva, E. (2019). Overexpression of ca1pase Decreases Rubisco Abundance and Grain Yield in Wheat. Plant Physiology, 181(2), 471–479.

Tegan’s favourite plant is the golden wattle, not just a wattle. This is the Bruce sketch we mention.

Joram presents the life and work of Arlette Nougarède, a French biologist exploring the inner workings of the shoot apical meristem.

Fun Stuff:

Catapult plant from In Defense of Plants

Tanentzapf lab’s tweet on best practice early in the career

1. This is stating the obvious but I think that early on in one’s scientific career it's pretty important to read a lot of papers & go to lots of seminar talks. In particular I think it’s quite important to attend as many bad talks & read as many badly written papers as possible.

Mental health note is in this paper. The MPG finally started offering psychological support and we welcome this change.

If you’re feeling depressed or down and think about harming yourself: seek help. Here is a list of international suicide help organisations.

Terrifying werewolf cats.

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Our opening and closing music is Caravana by Phillip Gross

Until next time!